The Politics of Faith during the Civil War

7. Confederate and Unionist Religious Life under the Gun

142 the politics of faith during the civil war ministers who had the luxury of rhetorical freedom.1 Such studies are noteworthy and bolster the argument for ministerial importance. Drew Gilpin Faust, for instance, asserts that “the authority of the clergy at least rivaled that of the new Confederate state,” while Harry Stout and Christopher Grasso offer that secession and war could have never come about without the “clergy’s active endorsement.”2 These fine historians’ work on the clergy notwithstanding, preachers who plied their rhetorical wares in inhospitable southern environs—be they Confederates or Unionists—seldom find their way into the historiography. Indeed, only in the last two decades or so have skillful historians like David Chesebrough considered the extent to which ministers in places like Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere were persecuted for their loyalties or the degree to which, conversely, they persisted in their congregant-inspiring sermonizing in spite of potentially fatal consequences.3 More such studies are needed if scholars are to better understand the role that preachers continued to play in the political lives of southerners away from the battlefront but nevertheless under the gun. For, no matter if they were beset by new foes in blue or old neighbors in grey, during the Civil War contrarian Confederate and Unionist ministers on the southern homefront retained their cultural and political primacy even when community, political, and military forces demanded otherwise. I A majority of southern denominational leaders ultimately embraced the Confederacy and exalted all that it stood for. Occupying Federal forces resultantly encountered pro-Confederate Christians dedicated to the idea of a white-supremacist and paternalistic state and who believed it their sacred duty to work toward the realization of a white man’s utopia. As Methodist Reverend J. W. Tucker told his southern listeners in May 1862, “Your cause is the cause of God, the cause of Christ, of humanity. It is a conflict of truth with error—of Bible with Northern infidelity—of pure Christianity with Northern fanaticism.”4 How then could Union soldiers convince southern ministers and the congregations they influenced that no institution, not even the church, could foster resistance to the occupying Federal authority? In most cases, they couldn’t. Southern ministers fomented their society’s rebelliousness toward the United States. For the most part, they were as vehement in their disdain for confederate and unionist religious life under the gun 143 the Union as they were in their evident affection for the Confederacy. There was little cause to feel otherwise, for supporters of the newly established southern government did not equate loyalty to the Confederate States with disloyalty of any sort—to the United States or anyone else. They believed all obligations of fidelity to the United States ended with secession. In their own estimation as southerners supremely devoted to the Confederacy’s assumed legitimate authority, preachers who resisted the power of northern troops and the government that sent them merely made the task of subjugation undertaken by a debased and illegal oppressor more difficult. Confederate clerics under occupation during the Civil War believed it right to promote among the faithful a Confederacy-affirming, religiously based defiance of Lincoln and, as any Rebel religious commentator worth his hyperbolic salt would have added, his sycophantic minions. The hybrid social and political urge to resist Federal authority felt by Confederate ministers was augmented by their conviction that the enemy’s troops were willing and eager to abuse the collective southern church after the fashion of Nero, Diocletian, and other past persecutors of the “true” faith. Time and again, for instance, soldiers apparently maltreated Confederate ministers. The Reverend R. B. C. Howell, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Nashville, was jailed for nearly two months in 1862 for refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States.5 Howell developed chronic health issues owing to the privations of prison life. After his release and return to the pulpit, he remained under military surveillance, his every sermon scrutinized by Federal authorities.6 By Howell’s estimation, during 1862 alone Union troops robbed him and other church members of over a half-million dollars’ worth of property, including slaves, crops, equipment, and personal items.7 Authorities allowed Howell to preach to his congregation from behind his own pulpit for less than two months during all of 1863, after which the congregation was forced to meet in a tiny, rented room...