Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era

11. “To Doubt This Would Be to Doubt God”: Reconstruction and the Decline of Providential Confidence

217 11 “TO DOUBT THIS WOULD BE TO DOUBT GOD” Reconstruction and the Decline of Providential Confidence Edward J. Blum R econstruction” (1867) was a millennial dream. It was also, in the hands of artists Horatio Bateman and J. L. Giles, a providential prophecy in pictorial form. Printed in 1867 just after Congress had passed the Fourteenth Amendment, this political cartoon imagined a sacred transformation of the United States. The national union of the antebellum era—upheld by pillars of slavery—was undercut first by Confederate secession and then by federal emancipation. The reconstructed nation would be built upon new pillars of justice,liberty,and education.Harmony would replace hate. Northern and southern whites would shake hands on the earth below, and in the sky above, whites from the nation’s past would populate heaven. Universal education would link blacks and whites in games and grammar. Universal suffrage would enfranchise African American men, and bodies and souls would be recognized as equal. A white baby and a black baby would coo next to one another in cradles side by side. The eagle of liberty would fly above and protect them carrying a bannered proclamation: “all men are born free and equal.” This vision was far more expansive than most historical accounts of Reconstruction . In addition to the transition from slavery to freedom, the contested political issues of citizenship and suffrage, the importance of education, and the desire for sectional reconciliation, Bateman and Giles incorporated women, Native Americans, technology, and the West.They pictured women in the voting ranks, conjured a United States that would respect Native American rights and dignities, and mapped a successful Reconstruction in the East moving to the West through canals, roads, and railroads.This West, though, was devoid of conflict—from either infamous Indians or polygamous Mormons. This was a 218 Edward J. Blum millennial manifest destiny that linked white, black, and red, male and female, citizen and student, North and South, East and West. Even further, Bateman and Giles translated Reconstruction from the natural to the supernatural. Religion was central to their rendering of the new United States. Above their prophesied Reconstruction, in the upper left side, the goddesses of liberty and justice preside over the new world. In the center, Jesus offers political, social, and religious instruction with his golden rule: “do to others as you would have others do to you.”1 Although central to the vision and spirit of “Reconstruction,”issues of postwar faith have been largely neglected not only by Reconstruction historians, but also by scholars of American religion. For Eric Foner, religion is something done within churches and by church leaders. For David Blight, religion is something that merely gets mixed with nationalism during civic ceremonies. For Steven Hahn, religion is one element of black political formation, but not elemental to it. For Heather Cox Richardson, religion is effectively unessential . Her pathbreaking West from Appomattox discusses the lobster industry of Maine, but not the Latter-day Saints.2 While there are some excellent works of religious history on the time period—especially from Paul Harvey, Daniel Stowell, James Moorhead, James Bennett, Charles Reagan Wilson, Reginald Hildebrand, and Clarence Walker—scholars of American religions have yet to connect religion to the crucial issues of the era.3 A survey of American religious history textbooks shows that Reconstruction hardly gets mentioned, except for the creation of autonomous black churches.4 Marie Griffith’s reader of primary documents on American religions, for example, has five documents on slavery, abolition, and the Civil War, but none on Reconstruction.5 Specific studies of providentialism and millennialism,such as Nicholas Guyatt’s Providence and the Invention of the United States, Catherine Albanese’s America: Religions and Religion, or Ernest Tuveson’s Redeemer Nation, gloss over Reconstruction in favor of supposedly bigger game like the American Revolution or the Civil War.6 But religion was central to Reconstruction, and Reconstruction fundamentally altered religions in the United States. If we follow Bateman and Giles by moving expansively throughout the United States, we find that Reconstruction was a crucial moment in the history of American religions. Religious language, concepts, ideas, and sentiments were key to the debates of the era. Political speeches,soldiers’diaries,political cartoons,labor newspapers,feminist critiques, and oral histories were full of religious expressions and ruminations. 219 “To Doubt This Would Be to Doubt God” Moreover, the destruction of southern slavery and the...