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Chapter 2. Secessionist Revolution
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Chapter 2 Secessionist Revolution When church bells in Lincolnton rang out at midnight on January 1, 1860, announcing the arrival of the New Year, the mood in the town was festive, as it was elsewhere in North Carolina and across the nation. Beneath the gaiety, however, Americans grew apprehensive about the future of their troubled republic. During the 1850s, sectional tension over the issue of slavery increased sharply, and acrimonious debate on extending slavery to newly acquired territories in the West threatened to divide the country and erupt into civil war. Attempts to reach an amicable compromise failed as political and ecclesiastical dissent over the issue of slavery escalated. Violence erupted in Kansas and on the floor of the U.S. Senate. At the close of the decade, John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, sent a shock wave throughout the South. The outpouring of sympathy for Brown from prominent men in the North, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and many Northern divines, inflamed Southerners’ indignation and sense of betrayal. In Lincolnton, David Schenck welcomed the New Year with family and friends and quietly reflected on the past year’s events. In the months since Lucy Ramseur’s death, Schenck’s perspective on Christian manhood, respectability , faith, ambition, and how to achieve them had begun to change. These attributes, which he so earnestly sought, comprised part of what historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown has described as “honor.” They constituted a prescribed set of ethics and behaviors that reflected a complex series of religious, social, and political values specific to each social class. In antebellum North Carolina, the distinction of honor, or respectability , was restricted to wealthy planters, evangelical leaders, and the small professional middle class to which David Schenck belonged. Honor, however, also served as a social construct used to bridge the gap between austere Protestant evangelicalism and the indolent planter elite. Although most middle-class professionals were considered respectable by polite society , they lacked the honor and prestige accorded to the wealthy. Moreover , the wealthy tended to inherit social and religious distinctions, while Secessionist Revolution 20 middle-class men like Schenck had to prove their worth. True Southern men were Christians who exhibited godliness and piety; they displayed devotion to duty and were committed to protecting their families and the Christian community, as well as the institution of slavery. Defending these hallmarks of Southern society and the social, economic, and political heritage they represented lay at the heart of Southern nationalism.1 Schenck’s weak faith and modest social standing had thus far impeded his efforts to achieve the honor and prestige he sought. During the controversial and divisive presidential election of 1860 and the civil war that followed, Schenck’s zeal for the Confederate cause helped him to forge a Confederate identity that linked Christianity, respectability, and patriotism—an identity that also would place him out of step and at odds with the majority of his fellow Tar Heels. David Schenck’s pro-Southern sentiment found its fullest expression in the nexus of religion and Southern patriotism. In January 1860, as he pondered the South’s political future, Schenck articulated his support for radical secessionists: “The South is in a considerable state of excitement on the present state of politics. I am a Disunionist,” he wrote.2 His support for disunion so early in 1860 contrasts with the Conditional Unionist sentiment held by the vast majority of North Carolinians. A few months later, after attending a sermon on the doctrine of imputed righteousness, Schenck experienced God’s plan of salvation like an epiphany, and his weak and faltering faith quickened to a vivacity that he had never before known. Shortly thereafter, he reported in his diary: “being thoroughly convinced of my duty I united myself to the Presbyterian Church in Lincolnton . . . for God has greatly increased my faith and strengthened my grace.”3 Schenck’s early commitment to secession and the timing of his religious awakening are no mere coincidence. Rather, they demonstrate the gradual process by which the sacred and secular spheres of his life converged into a single identity. The strained political and religious atmosphere that attended the sectional crisis, moreover, hastened that convergence. For many years, Southern divines had depicted the ecclesiastical conflict over slavery with their Northern counterparts in stark contrasting terms: orthodoxy versus heresy, purity versus corruption, godliness versus ungodliness. Schenck made a similar comparison, albeit implicitly, when, on the day he recorded joining the church, he...