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By Root 7330 0

Bull Run in 1861, Bushnell had delivered a sermon entitled “Reverses Needed,” calling for the nation’s resolve and devotion to be tested. Four years later he could affirm that America had passed its trial. The war’s suffering had guaranteed that “we are not the same people that we were, and never can be again.” A new understanding of nationhood as the incarnation of God’s design had been purchased by “our acres of dead.” Because, like Christianity, history “must feed itself on blood,” the United States now “may be said to have gotten a history.” The nation was “no more a mere creature of our human will, but a grandly moral affair.” Its purposes were now God’s purposes. “Hallowed” by “rivers of blood,” the United States claimed its place as the redeemer nation. “Government is now become Providential.” The “mournful offering” of war’s deaths had “bought a really stupendous chapter of history.” And the blood that had been shed to achieve God’s design of freedom, emancipation, and inspired nationhood, he explicitly recognized, was black as well as white, sacrificed at Fort Pillow and Fort Wagner as well as at Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Shiloh.44

Bushnell closed his oration by invoking a manifest destiny of national expansion, impelled in no small part by the need to compensate for war’s cost. There was a need, Bushnell emphasized, “to wind up and settle this great tragedy in a way to exactly justify every drop of blood that has been shed in it.” Like Confederate bishop Stephen Elliott, he too sought still “higher aims” to balance the flow of “such blood.” War’s destructiveness called for broadened purposes. “Ours be it also, in God’s own time,” he concluded, “to champion…the right of this whole continent to be an American world, and to have its own American laws, liberties, and institutions.”45

Bushnell spoke as a victor. One also suspects that he could talk so enthusiastically about blood because he had spent the war in Connecticut, distant from the battlefields “black with dead” that he described. But Providence had favored him, and he could thus claim its purposes as his own. His dead, the northern dead, could be explained as part of a larger purpose and grander plan. But for the defeated South, war’s terrible losses could only seem meaningless.46

As Confederate fortunes faltered, some white southerners “plainly indicated,” one woman reported, “that if our cause failed, they would lose all faith in a prayer answering God.” Confederate poet Henry Timrod had in fact suggested in “Ethnogenesis,” his 1861 celebration of the southern nation’s birth, that “to doubt the end were want of trust in God.” What then did it mean actually to see the end and to face defeat? What then of God’s trustworthiness? Surrender made war’s sacrifices seem purposeless; losses would remain unredeemed; southern fathers, brothers, and sons had not died that a nation might live.47

Even the most devout struggled to reconcile themselves to defeat and to find meaning for the slaughter. The Presbytery of South Carolina observed in the fall of 1865 that “the faith of many a Christian is shaken by the mysterious and unlooked-for course of divine Providence.” Baptist leader Samuel Ford recognized that “‘Where is God’ seemed to be the anxious questioning of each heart…Is there a God? many many asked.” Virginian Mary Lee felt herself “like a ship without a pilot or compass.” She could see no God at the helm.48

Some believers, like the Presbyterian editor John Adger, reminded their fellow southerners, as clergy had indeed reiterated throughout the trials of four years of war, that God chastened those he loved. Defeat was simply another burden to be borne with the unwavering patience that Job had exhibited in the face of divine affliction. “Yes! The hand of God, gracious though heavy, is upon the South for her discipline.” In Richmond, Reverend Moses Drury Hoge confessed that defeat “enwraps me like a pall.” But he determined not to “murmur” at God and instead would “await the development of his providence.”49

Many felt they had endured enough. After