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In the aftermath of the shocking defeat at the Battle of Bull Run in the summer of 1861, Republicans found it difficult to take a philosophically long view of the country’s situation. It helped, of course, to live far to the north of the nation’s capital and not to witness the frightening and humiliating arrival of the panicked and rain-soaked Union soldiers who had thrown their shiny new equipment away to speed their flight from the victorious rebel army. But Republican members of Congress, present for a special session called by the president to pass essential war legislation , recognized the threat posed by the Confederate victory to the perilous loyalty of the border slave states and hastened to reassure them that they had no designs on the institution of slavery. Seemingly as stampeded as the pathetic Union soldiers pouring in from Virginia, members of the House of Representatives voted 117 to 2 (and the Senate 30 to 5) for what came to be called the “Crittenden Resolution ,” declaring: That the present deplorable civil war has been forced upon the country by the disunionists of the southern States, now in arms against the constitutional Government, and in arms around the capital; that in this national emergency, Congress, banishing all feelings of mere passion or resentment, will recollect only its duty to the whole country; that this war is not waged on their part in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain CHAPTER FOUR Politics Purified: Religion and the Growth of Antislavery Idealism in Republican Ideology During the Civil War Mark E. Neely, Jr. the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease.1 Republicans owned great majorities in Congress, so the vote represented a cringingly practical party sentiment for them. In Boston, on the other hand, New England’s intellectuals could afford to take a longer view of the situation, and Charles Eliot Norton, for one, did. In an important article written quickly for the Atlantic Monthly, Norton attempted to convince his readers of “The Advantages of Defeat,” not something easily appreciated in Congress with“disunionists . . . in arms around the capital,” as the Crittenden Resolution so vividly expressed it. Norton could frame the Battle of Bull Run as an incident in a greater struggle: God has given us work to do not only for ourselves, but for coming generations of men. . . . We are fairly engaged in a war which cannot be a short one, even though our enemies should before long lay down their arms; for it is a war not merely to support and defend the Constitution and to retake the property of the United States, not merely to settle the question of the right of a majority to control an insolent and rebellious minority in the republic, nor to establish the fact of the national existence and historic unity of the United States; but it is also and more essentially a war for the establishment of civilization in that immense portion of our country in which for many years barbarism has been gaining power. It is for the establishment of liberty and justice, of freedom of conscience and liberty of thought, of equal law and personal rights, throughout the South. If these are not to be secured without the abolition of slavery, it is a war for the abolition of slavery. We are not making war to reestablish an old order of things, but to set up a new one.2 By pointing to God’s mission in the war, Norton echoed the message some northern clergymen had been asserting for months. Thus Henry Whitney Bellows, pastor of All Souls’ Church in New York, had preached an immediately popular sermon less than two weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter, published in pamphlet form as The State and the Nation—Sacred to Christian Citizens. It was “important to understand,” Bellows said, “that the contest before us is one in which some longrooted and deeply-bedded errors fatal to our peace, our national morals, our religion and our power and prosperity, are to be exterminated—it may be with bloody hands.” “It is no longer to be said with bated...

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