The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

Mark A. Noll

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780807877203
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia della guerra civile americana

Viewing the Civil War as a major turning point in American religious thought, Mark A. Noll examines writings about slavery and race from Americans both white and black, northern and southern, and includes commentary from Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Canada. Though the Christians on all sides agreed that the Bible was authoritative, their interpretations of slavery in Scripture led to a full-blown theological crisis.

Chapter 1
Introduction

In the uncertain days of late 1860 and early 1861, the pulpits of the United States were transformed into instruments of political theology. Abraham Lincoln, the president-elect, continued to insist that he would follow through on the platform of the Republican Party to prohibit forever the spread of slavery into new United States territory. On December 20, delegates to a special convention in Columbia, South Carolina, voted to secede from the Union. The other states of the Deep South seemed sure to follow, and those of the Upper South and border South likely to do so. In such dire circumstances, Americans looked to their preachers for instruction from God.

Ministers throughout the United States responded confidently. The will of God, as revealed first in the Scriptures and then through reflection on the workings of divine providence, was clear. Or at least it was clear to the ministers as individuals, many of whom were eager to raise a trumpet for the Lord. As a group, however, it was a different story, for the trumpets blown so forth-rightly were producing cacophony. On no subject was the cacophony more obvious, and more painful, than on the question of the Bible and slavery. On no subject did the cacophony touch such agonizing depths as on the question of God’s providential designs for the United States of America.

The Bible and Slavery

Whether the Union should be preserved was everywhere acknowledged to be the political question of the hour, but only inference or deduction could discern a message in the Bible concerning the specific fate of the United States of America. By contrast, on slavery, which everyone knew was the economic, social, and moral issue on which the political question turned, it was a different matter. The Bible, or so a host of ministers affirmed, was clear as a bell about slavery.

The Bible, for example, was clear to Henry Ward Beecher, the North’s most renowned preacher, when he addressed his Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York, on January 4, 1861, a day of national fasting called to have the people pray for the country’s healing. In Beecher’s view, the evil for which the United States as a nation most desperately needed to repent, “the most alarming and most fertile cause of national sin,” was slavery. About this great evil, the Bible could not speak with less ambiguity: “Where the Bible has been in the household, and read without hindrance by parents and children together—there you have had an indomitable yeomanry, a state that would not have a tyrant on the throne, a government that would not have a slave or a serf in the field.”¹

But of course the Bible spoke very differently to others who also rose to preach in that fateful moment. Six weeks earlier at a day of fasting called by the state of South Carolina, the South’s most respected minister, James Henley Thornwell, took up before his Presbyterian congregation in Columbia the very same theme of “our national sins” that Beecher would address before the Congregationalists of Brooklyn. To Thornwell, slavery was the “good and merciful” way of organizing “labor which Providence has given us.” About the propriety of this system in the eyes of God, Thornwell was so confident that, like Beecher, he did not engage in any actual biblical exegesis; rather, he simply asserted: “That the relation betwixt the slave and his master is not inconsistent with the word of God, we have long since settled. ... We cherish the institution not from avarice, but from principle.”²

The fact that Beecher in the North and Thornwell in the South found contrasting messages in Scripture by no means indicates the depth of theological crisis occasioned by this clash of interpretation. Since the dawn of time, warring combatants have regularly reached for whatever religious support they could find to nerve their own side for battle. Especially in our postmodern age, we think we know all about the way that interests dictate interpretations. It was, therefore, a more convincing indication of profound theological crisis when entirely within the North ministers battled each other on the interpretation of the Bible. In contrast to the struggle between Northern theologians and Southern theologians, this clash pitted against each other ministers who agreed about the necessity of preserving the Union and who also agreed that the Bible represented authoritative, truth-telling revelation from God.

Thus only a month before Beecher preached to the Brooklyn Congregationalists about the monstrous sinfulness of slavery, the Reverend Henry Van Dyke expounded on a related theme to his congregation, Brooklyn’s First Presbyterian Church, just down the street from Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational. But when Van Dyke took up the theme of the “character and influence of abolitionism,” his conclusions were anything but similar to Beecher’s. To this Northern Presbyterian, it was obvious that the “tree of Abolitionism is evil, and only evil—root and branch, flower and leaf, and fruit; that it springs from, and is nourished by, an utter rejection of the Scriptures.”³ So clear to Van Dyke were the biblical sanctions for slavery that he could only conclude that willful abolitionists like Beecher were scoffing at the Bible’s authority.

An even more interesting contrast with Beecher’s confident enlistment of the Bible against slavery was offered by Rabbi Morris J. Raphall, who on the same day of national fasting that provided Beecher the occasion for his sermon, addressed the Jewish Synagogue of New York. Like Van Dyke’s, his sermon directly contradicted what Beecher had claimed. Raphall’s subject was the biblical view of slavery. To the learned rabbi, it was imperative that issues of ultimate significance be adjudicated by “the highest Law of all,” which was “the revealed Law and Word of God.” Unlike the addresses from Thorn-well and Beecher, Raphall’s sermon was filled with close exegesis of many passages from the Hebrew Scriptures. Significantly, this Northern rabbi was convinced that the passages he cited taught beyond cavil that the curse pronounced by Noah in Genesis 9 on his son Ham had consigned “fetish-serving benighted Africa” to everlasting servitude. Raphall was also sure that a myriad of biblical texts demonstrated as clearly as demonstration could make it that slavery was a legitimate social system. Those texts included passages from Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.⁴ Raphall’s conclusion about the scriptural legitimacy of slavery per se reflected his exasperation at anyone who could read the Bible in any other way: “Is slaveholding condemned as a sin in sacred Scripture? ... How this question can at all arise in the mind of any man that has received a religious education, and is acquainted with the history of the Bible, is a phenomenon I cannot explain to myself.”⁵ As we shall see, Raphall had more things to say on the subject because he contended that much in the Bible argued against slavery as it was practiced in the United States; but on the issue of the legitimacy of the institution, narrowly defined, the New York rabbi was definite.

One of the many Northerners with a good religious education who knew the Bible very well, yet in whose mind questions did arise about the intrinsic evil of slaveholding, was Tayler Lewis, a Dutch Reformed layman and since 1838 a professor of Greek and oriental studies, first at New York University and then at Union College. In an essay that was originally published as a direct rejoinder to the Presbyterian Van Dyke and the Jew Raphall, Professor Lewis complained that “there is . . . something in the more interior spirit of those [biblical] texts that [Van Dyke] does not see; he does not take the apostles’ standpoint; he does not take into view the vastly changed condition of the world; he does not seem to consider that whilst truth is fixed, ... its application to distant ages, and differing circumstances, is so varying continually that a wrong direction given to the more truthful exegesis may convert it into the more malignant falsehood.”⁶ Given the extreme emotions of the day, Lewis was relatively charitable about what he considered Rabbi Raphall’s misreading of the Hebrew Scriptures. He was more concerned to show the errors in Van Dyke’s use of the Christian New Testament to defend slavery. Stated in its simplest form, Lewis’s contention was that “there is not a word in the New Testament about buying and selling slaves.”⁷ And since buying and selling slaves was intrinsic to the American slave system, the New Testament obviously condemned that system.

So it went into April 1861 and well beyond. The political standoff that led to war was matched by an interpretive standoff. No common meaning could be discovered in the Bible, which almost everyone in the United States professed to honor and which was, without a rival, the most widely read text of any kind in the whole country.

Providence

Clashes over the meaning of the Bible on slavery were matched during the era of the Civil War by an equally striking division in what the nation’s most widely recognized religious thinkers concluded about the workings of divine providence. Confident pronouncements about what God was “doing” in and through the war arose in profusion from all points on the theological compass. Yet as with debates over the Bible and slavery, interpretations of divine providence differed materially depending on the standpoint of the one who identified how God was at work.

An extreme example of such difference is provided by a pair of discourses from April 1861 and April 1862, which were similar in their learning, conviction, and religious passion, but otherwise strikingly at odds in opinions about what God intended for the slave system of the United States. In the Southern Presbyterian Review of April 1861, John H. Rice offered a comprehensive explanation for the existence of the Southern states that was based almost exclusively on the workings of providence. To Rice, it was obvious that the slave system—which he described as foisted on the Southern colonies by New England’s mercantile greed and Britain’s callous imperialism—had entered on hard times after the Revolutionary War and was by about 1815 nearing a crisis. Because the crisis was caused by the presence of a large and restive black slave population, it “could not be solved by any scheme of abolition, emancipation, or colonization.” At that bleak hour, “the providence of God opened the door of safety, by the operation of causes originating at points distant from each other by the whole length of the continent and the width of the broad Atlantic.” The “almost simultaneous” invention of the cotton gin in Connecticut and the spinning jenny in Britain, along with the opening of fertile cotton-producing land in America’s new Southwest, was manifestly God’s way of overcoming the crisis. After that remarkable conjunction of events, the South had flourished, with the only threat to its prosperity occasioned by “the foolish and wicked meddling of men” who attacked those “to whom God in His providence, has committed [the institution of slavery for] its guidance and control.” From this history, according to Rice, the South had taken the lesson “never to consent that her social system . . . be confined and restrained by any other limits than such as the God of nature interposes.” Slavery, in a word, had developed under “certain providential conditions” that Rice discerned as clearly as he saw “the wonderful providence of God” that had led first to the European colonization of America and then to the unexpected victory of American patriots in the War of Independence.⁸

One year later, Daniel Alexander Payne, presiding bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, preached a sermon in Washington, D.C., in order to celebrate the Union legislation that ended slavery in the federal district but also to urge his fellow African American Methodists to make the best of their newfound freedom. To Payne, it was as clear as it had been to Rice what God was about, although what he saw was the opposite of Rice’s perception. “Who has sent this great deliverance?” was Payne’s query. “The answer shall be, the Lord; the Lord God Almighty, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.” Only “thou, O Lord, and thou alone couldst have moved the heart of this Nation to have done so great a deed for this weak, despised and needy people!”⁹

The manifest contradiction in these two interpretations of providence, which was multiplied on every hand during the war years, was not the most telling feature of the appeal to providence. Rather, that most telling feature was the confident assurance with which those appeals were made. This widely shared confidence was, ironically, a major reason for the shallowness of providential reasoning during the war. It was also a feature suggesting that providential reasoning marked a crucial turning point in the broader history of American thought.

As with the question of the Bible and slavery, the American perception of providence also has a history. Unpacking that history is the best way to make sense of how providential reasoning worked during the war and then of why the exercise of such providentialism factored so significantly in the later intellectual history of the United States.

The Shape of This Book

The purpose of this book is to explain why clashes over the meaning of the Bible and the workings of providence, which grew directly out of the nation’s broader history before the Civil War, revealed a significant theological crisis. Although I hope that the book will indicate why serious attention to religion can add greatly to an understanding of the origin, the course, and especially the intensity of the Civil War, my main purpose is to show how and why the cultural conflict that led to such a crisis for the nation also constituted a crisis for theology.

The inability to find a univocal answer in Scripture to the pressing question of slavery troubled Americans for more than thirty years—from, that is, at least the early 1830s, when the rise of a more radical abolitionism precipitated a responding defense of slavery as a positive good, to the end of the war in 1865, when the success of Union arms rendered further exegetical debate pointless. Why this clash over the interpretation of Scripture—a clash that helps explain the intense religious fervor displayed on both sides—was so important in the broader sweep of American religious history is the issue I address in chapter 3. In chapter 4 this theme is carried further in order to explore the specific confusion that resulted when what the Bible said (or did not say) about race was subordinated to what it said about slavery. Then in chapter 5 the question turns to why widespread American belief in divine providence—the belief that God ruled manifestly over the affairs of people and nations—added fuel to the crisis, particularly as interpretations about God’s actions in and through the Civil War came to clash as fundamentally ...