Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920

Introduction: Origin and Overview

Thus saith the Lord . . . ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. —Jeremiah 6:16 Apparently they can learn nothing save through suffering, remember nothing save when underlined in blood. —William Faulkner, "The Bear" THIS is A STUDY of the afterlife of a Redeemer Nation that died. The nation was never resurrected, but it survived as a sacred presence, a holy ghost haunting the spirits and actions of post-Civil War South' emers. Embodying the dream of Southerners for a separate political identity, the Confederacy wasdefeated by Father Abraham and an apparently more blessed, as well as more self-righteous, Redeemer Nation . But the dream of a separate Southern identity did not die in 1865. A Southern political nation was not to be, and the people of Dixie came to accept that; but the dream of a cohesive Southern people with a separate cultural identity replaced the original longing. The cultural dream replaced the political dream: the South's kingdomwas to be of culture, not of politics. Religion was at the heart of this dream, and the history of the attitude known as the Lost Cause was the story of the use of the past as the basis for a Southern religiousmoral identity, an identity as a chosen people. The Lost Cause was therefore the story of the linking of two profound human forces, religion and history. This study examines the product of this connection in the South from the end of the Civil War until the end of World War I. It was a Southern civil religion, which tied together Christian churches and Southern culture. The religion of the Lost Cause originated in the antebellum period. Introduction ORIGIN AND OVERVIEW 2 INTRODUCTION Religion's central role in the South did not emerge early in Southern history. To be sure, the first settlers at Jamestown brought their Anglicanism with them, and a strong religious-moral tone existed in Virginia's earliest years, as in the Puritan colonies of New England. Despite the best efforts of clergymen and civil authorities, religion in the South did not become as vital a force as it was in Massachusetts Bay Colony. With the American Revolution, the Church of England in the new United States became the Episcopal church, and its position as the established church of the South ended. A new voluntary system of religious affiliation began in the South, as in the rest of the country, giving rise to the distinctive American denominational configuration . In Dixie, the Baptists and Methodists, who had only moved into the region in the late colonial period, and who had effectively participated in the challenge to the idea of an established church, emerged as the dominant denominations by 1800. This was primarily due to their role in the Great Revival of 1787 to 1805. The revival, which began in Kentucky in 1800, quickly spread to other areas of the South, bringing outcroppings of millennial thought centering on the South and establishing a central evangelical belief system.1 After 1805 the revival ebbed but did not dissipate, as spiritual awakenings periodically occurred thereafter. Schisms grew out of this revival era, but the important point was that by 1830 an evangelical unity had settled on the South, accompanied by a conservative orthodoxy of doctrine. While the Baptists and Methodists werenumerically dominating the Southern religious picture, the Presbyterians managed to hold their own in terms of influence because their ministers were well educated and their congregations tended to include prominent societal leaders. Similarly, the Episcopal church wasthe church of the planter class, concentrated in Virginia, coastal South Carolina, and the Mississippi delta. It adapted to the Southern scene by becoming Low Church, giving more attention to morality than to the mysteries of the ritual. In fact, in some areas the church was evangelical in orientation, like the other Southern denominations. Despite the variations between genteel Episcopalians, theologically oriented Presbyterians , and the intensely evangelistic popular denominations, all were united in opposition to rationalism, thus preventing the growthof ORIGIN AND OVERVIEW 3 the Unitarianism that wasmakinginroadsamongNortherners. "What the Southerner desired above all else in religion/' said Richard M. Weaver, "was a fine set of images to contemplate. . . . The contemplation of these images was in itself a discipline in virtue, which had the eifect of building up in him an inner restraint." By 1860 a religious culture had been...