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

Epilogue: The Sixth Seal

EPILOGUE And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood. . . . And the kings of the earth and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains. And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. REVELATION 6:12, 15-16 TheSixthSeal This page intentionally left blank wrote in The Savannah, "of a beautiful and tragic story of men who built a way of life upon foundations of sand. For cruelty and jealousy, bravery and high idealism, all are mingled in the story of the Savannah."l Nothing has loomed larger in that story than slavery. From colonial times, divines and laymen, Northerners and Southerners , whites and blacks, proslavery men and abolitionists all linked slavery to the will and wrath of God. George Whitefield and Samuel Davies, among many, accepted slavery but attributed the military and social problems of the colonial and revolutionary South to God's displeasure with the treatment of slaves. At the Federal Convention, George Mason of Virginia, describing every slaveholder as born a petty tyrant, cried that since nations cannot be punished in the next world, they may expect to be punished in this: "By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities ." More famously, Thomas Jefferson penned a scorching critique of slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia, concluding that, knowing God to be just, he trembled for the fate of his country. Their voices did not prevail. Southerners, step by step, embraced the proslavery reading of Scripture and became ever more deeply committed to the way of life slavery made possible.2 have read the story of my own South," Thomas L. Stokes I 126 A C O N S U M I N G F I R E The jeremiads, nonetheless, began early and never ceased, but none overmatched that which came in Darien, Georgia, in January 1739, shortly before the slave rising at Stono, South Carolina. Supporters of James Oglethorpe filed a petition against the proposed introduction of slavery into Georgia. They declared, "It is shocking to human nature, that any race of mankind and their Posterity, should be sentenced to perpetual slavery, nor injustice can we think otherwise of it, than that they are thrown amongst us to be our Scourge one day or other for our Sins: and as freedome to them must be as dear to us, what a scene of horrour must it bring about! and the longer it is un-executed, the bloody Scene must be the greater."3 A century and a quarter later, in 1863, thejudgment prophesied in 1739 came to pass as the Union army arrived in Darien. The Yankee noose had been slowly tightening, and the majority of the town's five hundred whites had already fled ("refugeed "), taking most of Darien's 1,500 blacks with them. The citizens who remained faced a Union army led by General David Hunter but led locally by two abolitionist colonels who commanded black troops: the cruel, vengeful James Montgomery and the humane, idealistic Robert Gould Shaw. The Confederate army had withdrawn, and the citizens capitulated , asking only that their helpless town be spared in accordance with the accepted procedures of warfare between civilized peoples. Their plea went unheeded. Montgomery gave his blessings to an orgy of looting, which, however, was not enough satisfy him. Over the protests of an outraged Shaw, Montgomery ordered his black troops to burn the defenseless town. The troops did their work con amore. Doubtless, those black troops and the whites of Darien had never heard E P I L O G U E 127 of the prophecy of 1739, whose instruments and victims they proved to be. The prophets of Darien rejected the notions prevalent in their day and proclaimed slavery itself as inherently a sin that would bring down the wrath of God. The slaveholders, in contrast , considered slavery inherently sinless but deeply flawed by temptations to sin that had...