The Politics of Faith during the Civil War

Epilogue

Epilogue T he end of the Civil War did not bring an end to all of the rhetorical battles between church members of common denominations or between preachers and their parishioners. Even those traditions that achieved a comparably amicable division, as was true of Episcopalianism, did not realize postwar reunion painlessly. Protestant Episcopals, overwhelmingly Democratic in the prewar North and South, split along sectional lines in 1862. Southern Episcopals maintained that separation had been thrust upon them, brought about by no malevolent act of their own but by the secession of the states wherein their dioceses sat. As the war neared its close and denominational reconciliation became increasingly feasible, their northern countrymen generally conceded the point. For instance, when one leader of northern Episcopalianism opined that secession was contemptible and that “all concerned in the attempt bore their share of the awful cost,” he was quick to add (upon church reunification in 1865) that none bore that cost “with a better grace or more patient dignity” than those southern members who out of necessity had formed the short-lived Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate states.1 And yet, according to a respected historian of Episcopalianism in America, Episcopal reconciliation proved tenuous at best in the early postwar months, its orchestrators constantly challenged by “grave difficulties” between southern and northern members born in the “sore temper on the one hand, and the triumphant one on the other.”2 So too Lutheranism, long assumed to have emerged from the war virtually unscathed, experienced postwar troubles.3 Lutheranism staved off separation until 1862, when southern Lutheran congregations severed their ties with the Lutheran General Synod and established a separate body in the Confederacy. Like Episcopals, southern Lutherans maintained that their actions were but a concession to the difficulties of maintaining a joint body. Not surprisingly, most Lutherans in the immediate postwar North were conciliatory as well; the prewar Lutheran hierarchy in its entirety was conservative on most issues, did not indict slavery, and in no way championed political preachers before the war. But beginning immediately after the war, church leaders instigated epilogue 195 numerous reconciliatory efforts in the North and South that met with retort and counter-retort and bore little real fruit. Although never prone to the vitriol exhibited by the members of other larger denominationalists, Lutherans did not achieve formal national unity until 1918.4 And if largely likeminded members of national denominations experienced postwar bitterness, imagine the difficulties faced by the leaders of long-alienated traditions like Methodism and Baptistism. As was true before the war, the leaders of America’s foremost Protestant churches found it difficult to put their differences aside. For example, while white Methodist Episcopal South leaders disagreed about the implications of bidding their African American members farewell—hundreds of thousands left their ranks for ascendant independent traditions like African Methodist Episcopalism—almost all of them felt real animosity toward the black and white northern Methodists who effected their departure. Moreover, Methodists in the old and new Baltimore conferences famously engaged in bitter feuds over such issues as church property and national affiliation.5 Farther down in Dixie, the Methodist Episcopal Church’s missionary efforts, to say nothing of the privileges of authority over “Rebel” churches in the South that the Federal government granted “Yankee” Methodist missionaries and agents of the Baptist-led American Home Mission Society after the war, often resulted in vicious quarrels between churchmen.6 Very often, attempts at reunification spawned even more schisms. The Louisville, Kentucky, Presbyterian ministers who in 1866 refused to sacrifice their vote in the General Assembly (pending an investigation into their assumed Copperheadism by a committee of fellow, i.e., northern, ministers) predictably then balked at the dissolution of their existing Louisville Presbytery and the establishment of a new presbytery “to be called by the same name, occupy the same territory, and have care of the same churches” but to be led by a new cadre of ministers who repudiated all past rebellious behavior. Ultimately, the 1866 imbroglio led to the formal division of the Presbyterian Church in Kentucky and Missouri, something the war itself had not done in these two Union states.7 As Methodist historian Edmund Hammond offered in 1935, in the immediate postwar climate “it would have been ideal if some far-visioned ecclesiastical genius could have arisen with . . . a proposal for reconciliation,” but because “the wounds of the time were deep,” they would be long in healing. Indeed, Hammond offered, given the immediate postwar...