Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War

INTRODUCTION. Religion, Religious Minorities, and the American Civil War

K฀introduction฀L Religion, Religious Minorities, and the American Civil War Tremendous Storm Brewing P eter Hartman hurried home to his family’s farm outside Harrisonburg , Virginia, carrying the Rockingham Register. It was November 1860, and Peter’s father, David, had sent his son to town for a copy of the county’s weekly paper. Like other families throughout the United States, the Hartmans were keeping a wary eye on political developments that year, especially during the fall months, when four major candidates battled to be the U.S. President.1 When Peter arrived home that evening, the rest of the Hartman householdwaswaiting .Hehandedthepapertoanoldersister,whousuallyread it aloud to the rest of the family. “The first thing my sister read,” Hartman recalled, “was that Lincoln was elected.” The news “made us all weak” and “almost made the blood run cold.” The Hartman family had clear unionist sympathies and did not object to Lincoln himself; rather, they understood that the Illinois Republican’s election portended political instability at best, and political breakdown and civil strife at worst. Peter’s thoughts ran to something he had overheard an old man telling his father: “There is a tremendous storm brewing in the South, and when that storm breaks with all its fury, it will shake the South to its very center.”2 Rural Virginians who harbored political concerns, David and Elizabeth (Burkholder) Hartman were also Mennonites, members of a thriv- 2฀ K฀mennonites, amish, and the american civil war L฀ ing community of church folk in the Shenandoah Valley whose lives both paralleled and diverged from those of their white neighbors. For example , the Mennonites generally took a dim view of disunion, as did most yeomen (small-scale independent farmers) in this part of their state, who tended to be skeptical of the political rhetoric that came from Richmond and other Southern state capitals dominated by wealthy planters and proMennonite Henry H. Derstine (1841–1900) of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in about 1860, shortly before he “skedaddled” to Ontario to avoid the military draft. He later returned to eastern Pennsylvania, married, and raised a family. Credit: Mennonite Heritage Center, Harleysville, Pa. fessional elites. But Mennonites were also opposed to slavery, a position that, if it did not make them entirely unique in the slave-based economy of the South, certainly placed them outside the mainstream. Moreover, they were committed to a Christian ethic of pacifist nonresistance, unwilling to fight when ordered by the government or even to defend their families with force, a stance that set them apart in a Southern culture that championed martial honor—and even apart from most Protestant evangelicals with whom Mennonites shared some affinity.3 YetMennonitesasagroupwouldnotshareasingularCivilWarstoryin the months and years that followed. Even as Rockingham County church members like David Hartman continued to nurse unionist sentiments, Mennonite bishop Jacob Hildebrand of Augusta County, Virginia, noted in his diary on the following May 23, “I was at Waynesboro; votet for Seesetion [sic].”4 Nor were Mennonites in the North, where 90 percent of their numbers lived, as did their spiritual cousins the Amish, always of one mind on how best to reject rebellion as peace people.5 Pennsylvania Mennonites became a core constituency for Radical Republican congressman and war hawk Thaddeus Stevens, who protected their conscientious objector privilege. Meanwhile, in Ohio, Mennonite bishop John M. Brenneman discouraged such deals. Brenneman drafted a petition to Lincoln but then demurred, deciding that the president was “but a poor dying mortal like ourselves.” To expect help from civil authorities was to “lean on a broken reed.”6 The intensity of the war and the issues it evoked sometimes sparked contrasting reactions even from close-knit ethnic sectarians . Like the Hartmans, other Mennonites sensed that they could not withdraw from the tremendous storm that was brewing; but how to construe their separation in such a situation was far from clear. Religion and the American Civil War The Civil War remains an epoch-defining event, staggering in its enormity . The national conflagration killed more than 620,000 soldiers in four years. Nearly one in five men of military age in the South, and one in sixteen in the North, died. It is no exaggeration to say that everyone knew someone who did not come home from the war, a situation without parallel in U.S. history. And tens of thousands of men who did return had ฀ K฀religious minorities and...