"But What Is Our Duty?": Bishop McIlvaine's Civil War

The American Civil War calls into question any single definition of national identity and purpose as has no event before or since. Most especially was that true of one young corps of cadets and their twenty-six-year-old chaplain, Charles Pettit McIlvaine, who came together at the U.S. Military Academy in the late 1820s. Several of those cadets were destined to be prominent military leaders in Civil War, as their sense of duty, honor, and allegiance arrayed them into opposing armies. Their chaplain was likewise destined for important service, as his sense of duty made him a steadfast supporter of the Union. He would be the Episcopal bishop of Ohio from 1831 until his death in 1873, and during the war he promoted the Union cause on many fronts. He did so at the pulpit and in the press, and helped maintain troops' morale by visiting Union armies in the field. Taking temporary leave from his duties as bishop in 1861, he accepted the Lincoln administration's diplomatic appointment to Great Britain, where he delicately upheld the Union cause in the aftermath of the Trent affair. Returning to the United States, he concerned himself with the personal well-being of soldiers by championing the work of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the U.S. Christian Commission. After the war, on a bleak and somber day in April 1865, as a warm supporter and admirer of Abraham Lincoln, he presided over the services attending the president's funeral train during its stop at Cleveland.

Nowhere are the religious and secular dimensions of secession and the clash of arms that followed more fully framed than in Bishop McIlvaine's Civil War experiences. His sense of duty to the unity and mission of the Episcopal Church guided his stance on slavery and sectional issues before the war, and with the commencement of hostilities McIlvaine fully embraced the Union cause. The secession crisis recast personal associations and relationships and challenged previous understandings and assumptions about the nature of the Union. Writing to former West Point superintendant Col. Sylvanus Thayer in October 1860, McIlvaine appraised the nation's rickety condition with much sorrow. While in outward appearance the Union still existed, its inner vitality was waning: "There is a running down, a decline, an unpinning of the machine." McIlvaine struck a similar note of despondence in correspondence with the Anglican clergyman William Carus. Writing to Carus on Christmas Eve in 1860, he confided his distress and foreboding over the secession crisis. "Congress is now setting; and scarcely anybody seems to hope that the Union will be preserved, without some new confederation." He did not doubt that secession would be an untidy and contentious affair: "The States are so bound together by trade, intercourse, [and] family relationship[s], that the prospect of separation is most painful. All affects the interests of religion most deeply."¹ Most emphatically, that was true of the interests and well-being of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States. The church, along with the imperiled Union, was about to split along a North-South divide. Although still one in faith, the bishops, clergy, and laity in the northern and southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church soon found themselves embracing irreconcilable political allegiances.

Figure 1.

Charles Pettit McIlvaine, Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, ca. 1855-1865. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

Early Career and West Point Chaplaincy

Charles Pettit McIlvaine was born in Burlington, New Jersey, on January 18, 1799, the third of five sons and two daughters born to Joseph and Maria Reed McIlvaine. Charles acquired his early education at the Burlington Academy, where his father was a trustee. He entered the College of New Jersey (later Princeton College) in May 1814 with the intention of studying law but soon developed an interest in theology. He graduated with first honors in September 1816 and, having determined upon a career in the ministry, entered the Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church at Princeton in September 1817. McIlvaine was raised as...