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By Root 7247 0

Appomattox Grace Elmore of South Carolina wrote in despair, “I know not how to bear it. I cannot be resigned.” She acknowledged that “hard thoughts against my God will arise.” She had lost two cousins to the war, had dealt with Yankee invaders in her own house, and had lived through the burning of Columbia with “flames before, behind and around us.” She struggled to fit her experience into Christian narratives of suffering and redemption, but with the resurrection of the Confederate state all but impossible, she saw little hope of salvation. “Night and day in every moment of quiet,” she wrote, “I am trying to work out the meaning of this horrible fact, to find truth at the bottom of this impenetrable darkness…Has God forsaken us?” Widowed, homeless, and destitute, Cornelia McDonald of Virginia shared Elmore’s feelings of abandonment. She described lying immobile on a sofa through “dreadful hours of unbelief and hopelessness.” But gradually memories of God’s mercies crept over her, and she resolved once again to trust in him despite her afflictions.50

Like McDonald, most former Confederates would suppress their doubts and return to religious belief and observance. Churches grew dramatically in the South in the years after the Civil War, setting the stage for the region’s emergence as the Bible Belt in the twentieth century. But many white southerners remained bewildered, as Mary Lee put it, by God’s mysterious ways in subjecting them to the anguishing losses of war. The cult of the Lost Cause and the celebration of Confederate memory that emerged in the ensuing decades were in no small part an effort to affirm that the hundreds of thousands of young southern lives had not, in fact, been given in vain.

The victors’ providential view of the conflict and of Union and emancipation offered white northerners and African Americans throughout the nation a consoling narrative of divine purpose and sacrifice. But not all Americans were satisfied with such a justification of war’s cost. The horrors of battle and the magnitude of the carnage were difficult to put aside. The force of loss left even many believers unable to abandon lingering uncertainties about God’s benevolence. Doubters confronted profound questions not just about God but about life’s meaning and the very foundations of both belief and knowledge.

In his study of a group of prominent mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals clustered around Harvard, Louis Menand has argued that the Civil War not only “discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it” it destroyed “almost the whole intellectual culture of the North.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose father had rushed to find him after he was wounded at Antietam, was one of these men, and Menand believes he never recovered from the mental impact of his experiences. The younger Holmes had volunteered to fight, Menand explains, because of certain moral principles, but “the war did more than make him lose those beliefs. It made him lose his belief in beliefs.” This was more than just a loss of faith; it was an issue of both epistemology and sensibility, of how we know the world and how we envision our relationship to it.51

One product of the horror of the Civil War was the proliferation of irony, of a posture of distance and doubt in relation to experience. Literary scholar Paul Fussell has written that wars always beget irony because intentions are so often overturned by circumstance; war’s outcomes are so much more terrible than we can ever anticipate. Certainly this was true of the American Civil War, which began with statesmen assuring one another of all but bloodless victory. But the predominant response to the unexpected carnage was in fact a resolute sentimentality that verged at times on pathos. Songs abounded in which soldiers entreated their mothers to “come, Your Boy is Dying,” to “bless me…ere I die,” or “kiss me once before I go,” or “make me a child again just for tonight.” Novels and stories shared the enthusiastic earnestness of The Gates Ajar. But another, contrasting sensibility emerged