Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South

4. An Uncertain Trumpet

CHAPTER FOUR For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? i CORINTHIANS 14:8 An Uncertain Trumpet This page intentionally left blank hen the Confederacy collapsed, the divines ruefully allowed that God had punished the South for failing to do justice to its slaves. Simultaneously, they reiterated their conviction that they had not sinned in upholding slavery per se. In October 1865, the Baptist Religious Herald of Richmond, Virginia , defiantly asked "whether any combination of capital and labor ever produced greater freedom from want and suffering, and a higher degree of contentment and cheerfulness among the laboring classes, than did Southern slavery." A month later, the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in a pastoral letter, reiterated that Holy Scripture contains everything necessary for salvation and warned against a misreading of the fall of the Confederacy. It affirmed that the War had settled the question of "the powers that be," whom Southerners were commanded to obey as they rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. But the conference insisted that the demise of slavery did not invalidate the certainty that God had ordained it in a previous time and place. Educators like the Presbyterian Reverend T. E. Peck of Union Theological Seminary in Richmond firmly contended that, religiously and morally, slavery was by no means a settled issue. The intransigence of the divines may be more readily understood if for "slavery" we substitute "some form of personal servitude" and recall the long efforts to bring their preferred social system up to biblical standards.1 w 1O2 A C O N S U M I N G F I R E Christian Southerners, sadly acknowledging that they had lost the War because a persistent sinfulness had cost them God's favor, recognized a bitter irony. By forfeiting God's favor , they had sentenced themselves to live under the very social system that they had condemned as un-Christian in tendency . Punished for their lapses, they now found themselves enmeshed in a materialistic, marketplace society that promoted competitive individualism and worshiped Mammon. From early on, they had feared that defeat would ensure precisely that outcome. In December 1861 the Reverend J. Henry Smith of North Carolina declared, as others were doing in their own words, "If we fail, the progress of civilization will be thrown back a century." A still hopeful James Henley Thornwell pondered that fearful possibility in a letter written to his wife shortly before his death in 1862: "Every day increases my sense of the value of the principles for which we are contending . If we fail, the hopes of the human race are put back for more than a century."2 Thornwell could contemplate the possibility of defeat without loss of the optimism of the will that Romain Rolland has wisely suggested must accompany pessimism of the intellect, but not all of his compatriots could match his confidence in the ultimate triumph of the principles for which they were contending . When the prospects for a Union victory mounted after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, ministers and secular leaders continued to express confidence in a Confederate victory, but a note of desperation crept into their sermons. Haunted by fears of a religious as well as social and political catastrophe, the preachers redoubled their efforts to rally the faithful, but, notwithstanding the growing doubts, they continued to resist the AN U N C E R T A I N T R U M P E T 103 idea of slavery's inherent sinfulness. Instead, they reiterated their belief that slavery,with all its faults, sustained a Christian social order, and they focused on the dreaded consequences of the victory of the Antichrist. Southerners must trust God to save them, the preachers cried, for the Yankee invaders have shown how utterly bestial they can be. The preachers reminded their people that an infidel North stood for a political radicalism that threatened the very foundations of civilization. If the North wins, they prophesied, the country will fall under a ruthless tyranny that will, among other atrocities, extinguish religious liberty and, with it, religious truth.3 At the end of the War, the unreconstructed Robert L. Dabney suffered such deep discouragement that he considered emigration. Virginia, he wrote to the Reverend Moses Drury Hoge in August 1865, will no doubt recover its prosperity but only at the price of "being completely Yankeeized...