“The First Secessionist Was Satan”: Secession and the Religious Politics of Evil in Civil War America

Charlie Tenney was young, in love, and at war. A Union private marching across the “sacred soil” of Virginia, he often found his imagination flying northward and westward to his home in Ohio. Addie Case was there, and so was his heart. Whenever Charlie had a free moment, he shook off the bed bugs, took out a quill, and did his best to practice courtship through cursive penmanship. He had to rely on his letters and the U.S. Postal System to win her affection. “Would you be offended if I were to say my dear Addie?” he asked in June 1861: “My heart prompts me to.” Addie liked Charlie too, and she wrote back as often as possible. Charlie left Ohio just after President Abraham Lincoln called for troops in April 1861. He kept fighting and writing even as the war that was supposed to last but a few months turned into a bloodbath with no end in sight.¹

In July 1862, the young private took a moment to reflect on what he saw and connect the war with supernatural forces. He delighted in the landscape. Virginia was a “beautiful place”—too bad its residents were “rebel to the core.” In his estimation, secession was a “blighting curse” and Confederates were fools for rebelling against “a great and good government.” Tenney was not simply fighting on behalf of this “great and good” Union; he was also battling a dark principle with evil origins. Underlining the words in this part of his love letter, Charlie wove together politics and religion, the biblical past with the military present: “The first secessionist was Satan.”²

In the dozens of collected letters between Charlie and Addie, this reference to the devil seems odd and out of place. Neither referred to Satan, demons, or hell like this in any other letter.³ Why did Charlie turn to the devil rhetorically? Why did he associate secession with Satan? Was it simply a strange aside, a generic demonization of an enemy during wartime, or was he underscoring some deeper political and religious points?

What was singular in this correspondence was in fact quite common in American culture. By linking Satan to secession, Charlie Tenney joined a broad phenomenon in which Americans sought to make sense of war with references to supernatural evil. As historians W. Scott Poole and Andrew Delbanco have demonstrated, Americans from the colonial period to the Civil War era routinely invoked Satan, demons, hell, and Antichrist in their religious, political, and social conflicts. Devil references served a variety of functions. Sometimes they were revivalist persuasion techniques to convert sinners to Protestant Christianity. Sometimes they were part of political and religious diatribes. And sometimes they were elements of calls for social change. Most often, references to biblical evil functioned as rhetorical devices to amplify disgust.⁴

Tenney’s specific reference to the devil, however, indicated that the war had ushered in a novel approach. By conjoining Satan and secession, Tenney and unionists like him did much more than provide another rationale for waging war: they crafted nuanced religious and political points that simultaneously delegitimized the Confederate cause and distanced Confederate people from culpability. Unionists accomplished this, first, by collapsing the distance between the Bible’s sacred past and the nation’s present troubles. If the devil was the original secessionist, then secession was not a natural or inalienable right. Instead, it was an evil act, following in the older, prehuman, footsteps of the original diabolical fall from heaven. This historical positioning allowed unionists a means to evade Confederate claims that secession followed the “right to revolution” established by the nation’s founding fathers.⁵

Second, linking Satan to secession created space wherein Confederates could be disassociated from the evils of war or slavery. If Satan inspired secession, then perhaps Confederates were merely deceived by the devil and thus not fully to blame for wanting either slavery or political independence. Just as the idea of a slave power conspiracy led some northern Republicans—Abraham Lincoln, for example—to...