Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War

CHAPTER 8. Did Jesus Christ Teach Men to War?

K฀chapter 8฀L Did Jesus Christ Teach Men to War? Equal Burdens? D eacon Jacob Nold was frustrated with his fellow Columbiana County, Ohio, Mennonites. Federal conscription had been in place for several months, but it was proving difficult to organize a mutual aid plan to help draftees cover their exemption fees. Writing in October 1863 to his minister friend Johannes Gross in eastern Pennsylvania ’s Bucks County, Nold admitted that the trouble had surfaced already the year before. “The [state] draft when it was placed in our community [in 1862] also hit a few persons who were poor brothers, and we thought about having a tax on the church to help them,” Nold explained, “but we could not bring that much together.” Now, a year later, Nold made a new appeal that the cost of commutation be “an equal burden to the rich and the poor.” At first “the entire church was agreed,” but then “a few brothers who have a lot of wealth, but . . . have no son in the draft . . . opposed it rather hard, so that it fell through again.”1 As a successful businessman and a deacon responsible for the welfare of his congregation, Nold had hoped that each member would give “according to his means” and “regretted that in this troubled time things are so unequal .” As relative newcomers to the region, perhaps his people were less well established than those in eastern Pennsylvania, whose wealth often outpaced their neighbors. Yet Nold believed that at least a few Columbiana nonresistants were reaping “profit from the war,” which added to his chagrin. Some “must suffer and pay much, while others are making more 164฀ K฀mennonites, amish, and the american civil war L฀ money than in peace times,” he was sure. More troubling, Nold heard of “heathenish carrying on in the name of politics” among some Mennonites. Thankfully, partisan activity was not common in his congregation, but “the party spirit is hard to keep out of the churches.”2 Holmes County, Ohio, native Joseph Longenecker, son of Mennonites Peter and Elizabeth (Shank) Longenecker, was also disappointed with attitudes that the draft revealed in his home community, but for reasons quite different from Nold’s. Longenecker was in Union uniform at Murfreesboro , Tennessee, when he wrote home in June 1863. He had just witnessed the execution of an accused deserter, describing the grim ritual in some detail. But what troubled Longenecker more was the news he was getting from Holmes County. Could it really be true, as he had learned from a recent newspaper account, that hundreds of Holmes countians would resist the draft? Longenecker found the possibility offensive. “One who is too much of a coward to fight for his home is also too big a coward to let himself be shot by resisting,” he declared.3 Jacob Nold and Joseph Longenecker sounded some of the divergent themes that marked Midwestern Mennonite and Amish experiences in the later years of the war. Like Longenecker, federal troops were becoming impatient with the Midwest’s vocal war critics—critics whose views permeated the secular newspapers serving some key Mennonite and Amish communities.4 Such partisanship, in turn, had apparently pushed some nonresistants into the Democratic “Copperhead” camp, while attaching others more firmly to the Republican administration. Yet any political identification bothered Nold, who believed it compromised church integrity . Indeed, his sense of civic separatism illustrated a thread of Mennonite and Amish thought that was coming to mark the weave of theology among these groups west of the Alleghenies. Its articulation by new and influential Midwestern voices would prove to be a crucial legacy of the war. In 1863 the federal draft was often a focus of emotional rhetoric, and communities debated the war’s wisdom and the limits of loyalty and dissent .Thatspring,Mennonite-rearedJohnLongeneckeroftheOhio102nd wrote that men in his camp would like “every rebel sympathizer in the North [to be] drafted and compelled to fight or be shot. I do hope the conscription law will force every enemy to the Government into the field.”5 At about the same time, in Wells County, Indiana, home to a portion of the Swiss Mennonite and Amish immigrant community in the eastern part of that state, the Bluffton Banner ran an editorial surrounded by a thick black band of the sort typically used to frame an obituary, openly criticizing conscription. “If old Abe says...