This Republic of Suffering [90]
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is perhaps the best-known example of such an explanation and justification of war’s carnage. Determined that “these dead shall not have died in vain,” Lincoln hallowed and sacralized a nation and its purposes with biblical cadences—even as he scarcely mentioned God. In the address the dead themselves become the agents of political meaning and devotion; they act even in their silence and anonymity. Lincoln immortalized them as the enduring inspiration for an immortal nation. Unlike the “honored dead,” the Union would not “perish from the earth.” Soldiers’ deaths, like Christ’s sacrifice, become the vehicle of salvation, the means for a terrestrial, political redemption.39
Lincoln’s providential view of the war and its carnage appeared with perhaps even greater force a year and a half later, as both the conflict and his life neared conclusion. In the Second Inaugural of March 1865 Lincoln again offered an explanation for wartime slaughter, but this time it was God, not man, who gave it meaning. An Old Testament God of justice is avenging the sins of slavery. The Civil War and its deaths are not so much sacrifice as atonement. “Yet if God wills that it continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”40
Providential views of the war had abounded from the earliest days of the conflict, when North and South competed to claim God for their side. The Confederacy, as one southern clergyman declared, would be the “nation to do His work upon earth.” Deo Vindice, with God as vindicator, the official Confederate seal proclaimed. But only as the enormous cost in lives became clear did it seem imperative explicitly to link providentialist notions to war’s losses, to impart to these deaths both transcendence and meaning. As Georgia bishop Stephen Elliott explained this necessity in an 1864 sermon, “To shed such blood, as we have spilled in this contest for the mere name of independence, for the vanity or the pride of having a separate national existence, would be unjustifiable before God and man. We must have higher aims than these.” War’s dead and war’s cost were changing and amplifying the understanding of its ends.41
But as Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, delivered on the eve of victory, insisted, God “has his own purposes” and makes his own judgments. He, and neither Yankees nor Confederates, would define the reach of his providence. Both sides in the terrible conflict “read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other…The prayers of both could not be answered.” Northern success and southern defeat necessarily altered providential explanations of war and its carnage. Northerners were reinforced in their conviction that lives had not been lost in vain and were encouraged in their sense of national mission; Confederates confronted what for many became a profound test of faith.42
A little more than three months after Appomattox, northern clergyman and theologian Horace Bushnell celebrated northern victory by placing the dead and their sacrifice at the center of war’s accomplishment. The slain, he declared, were “the price and purchase-money of our triumph.” You get what you pay for, his oration implied; only war’s cost had ensured its transformative impact. Bleeding, he asserted, was necessary to God’s expansive—and expensive—purposes for America, and “in this blood our unity is cemented and forever sanctified.” The Christian narrative of redemption through suffering and sacrifice framed Bushnell’s rendering of the war and its meaning. Death was not loss, but both the instrument and the substance of victory.43
Early in the conflict, on the Sunday after the Union defeat at First