© 2013 Lucius Wedge ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ANDREW JOHNSON AND THE MINISTERS OF NASHVILLE: A STUDY IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WAR, POLITICS, AND MORALITY A Dissertation Presented to The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Lucius Wedge August, 2013 ANDREW JOHNSON AND THE MINISTERS OF NASHVILLE: A STUDY IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WAR, POLITICS, AND MORALITY Lucius Wedge Dissertation Approved: Accepted: _________________________ _________________________ Advisor Department Chair Dr. Lesley J. Gordon Dr. Martin Wainwright _________________________ Committee Member _________________________ Dr. Gregory Wilson Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences _________________________ Dr. Chand Midha Committee Member Dr. Kevin Adams _________________________ _________________________ Dean of the Graduate School Committee Member Dr. George R. Newkome Dr. Zachary R. Williams _________________________ _________________________ Committee Member Date Dr. William Lyons ii ABSTRACT “Andrew Johnson and the Ministers of Nashville: A Study in the Relationship between Politics, War, and Morality.” In early 1862 Andrew Johnson was appointed the Military Governor of Tennessee, and charged with bringing the state back into the Union. In the prosecution of this office he quickly arrested all residents of Nashville he deemed threatening to national unity. Johnson targeted the political leaders of the community including city council members and newspaper editors. He then targeted the ministers of Nashville. In his initial sweep, he found six ministers in the city who were expressing pro-Confederate sentiments from the pulpit. Johnson demanded they swear an oath of loyalty as a group. The ministers, Robert B.C. Howell, Samuel Baldwin, Collins Elliott, Edmund Sehon, William Sawrie, and Reuben Ford considered the oath and rejected it. Johnson arrested them and sent them into prisoner of war camps farther North. Johnson quickly followed the arrest of these ministers by arresting the chaplain of the state penitentiary, again for aiding the Confederacy. The figures involved were themselves fairly typical midcentury southerners. The ministers were respectable middle class men with families and civic responsibilities. Johnson had emerged as a successful, but unremarkable politician. The war and iii subsequent arrest transformed these, otherwise, unremarkable individuals. The ministers through their experiences emerged as prime advocates of mass Southern identity. The ministers understood this identity as being rooted within their assumptions of divine providence, racial hierarchy, and their own position in society. As such, the war also required an adjustment of the ministers’ apocalyptic understanding of their nation. The arrest itself served to define their understanding of these theological and social norms. The ministers adjusted to a changing landscape as they adapted to the challenges presented by the Confederacy’s defeat. The requirements of Reconstruction pushed the ministers to explain the failure of God to support the South, which they managed through the promotion of the Lost Cause. The creation of the Lost Cause myth served as a new civic religion for the South, and the ministers acted as its prime adherents. Johnson presents a very different view of antebellum southern Christianity. Johnson never claimed membership in a church, and early in his political career he was accused of being an atheist. Despite this Johnson articulated a nationalistic version of Christianity in which devotion to God was coequal to devotion to the democratic state. This provided Johnson with a clarity concerning God’s providence. Johnson clearly recognized the importance of Christianity in helping to shape public opinion, and as such he understood religious leaders served the Confederacy as significantly as political figures. As a result of these concurrent factors Johnson emerged as a religious figure, despite the historiographical interpretation of him as nonreligious. The ministers emerge as one of the animating factors of southern identity, and Confederate nationalism. Moreover, the proslavery ideology of the Southern ministers and their millennial iv interpretations of America’s place in the world continue to be significant throughout the typical historical periodization of the mid nineteenth century. v TABLE OF CONTENTES Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION..…...…………………………………….………………………1 II. A CONDENSED EXAMINATION OF NINETEENTHCENTURY THEOLOGY…………………………………………………………………………..46 III. “THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST IS NOT OF THIS WORLD”: THE MILLENNIALISM AND NATIONALISM OF ROBERT BOYTE CRAWFORD HOWELL…………………………………………...…………………………………81 IV. SEHON AND SAWRIE: CIRCUIT RIDERS AND MORAL SUASION……………………………………………………………………………..105 V. COLLINS D. ELLIOTT: A SOUTHERN EDUCATOR………………………….128 VI. WILLIAM WHARTON, REUBEN FORD AND COMMON MINISTRY……...162 VII. SAMUEL BALDWIN: THE APOCALYPTIC PROPHET OF CIVIL WAR NASHVILLE………………………………………………………………………….177 VIII. ANDREW JOHNSON………………………………………………………......204 IX. CONCLUSION: THE SOUL OF THE SOUTH AND THE NATION…………...230 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………..239 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION On June 18, 1862, Andrew Johnson held a meeting with several of Nashville’s more prominent and pro-secessionist ministers. The transcript of the meeting that made its way to the Nashville Union, and eventually the New York Herald, offered only a few indications of the ministers’ opinion of Johnson’s request that they subscribe to a loyalty oath.1 The ministers asked for varying lengths of time to consider the request. Collins Elliot, one of the most prominent of the ministers gathered, had the sharpest reaction to the oath. The conversations ended with a terse exchange between Elliot and Johnson. Elliot claimed that under the terms of Nashville’s surrender he could not be required to take the oath. Johnson replied by naming Elliot as disloyal and a traitor, particularly for the stance he had taken with the Nashville Female Academy. Elliot had served as the president of this school almost since he had moved to Nashville, and when war broke out 1 It seems that Johnson adjusted the exact wording of the Oath to be taken from case to case. He required the ministers to swear the following: “I do solemnly swear that I will support, protect and defend the Constitution and government of the United States against all enemies, whether domestic or foreign, and that I will bear true faith, allegiance and loyalty to the same, and laws ordinances, resolutions or conventions to the contrary notwithstanding; and farther, that I do this with a full determination, pledge and purpose without any mental reservation or evasion whatsoever; and, further, that I will well and faithfully perform all the duties which may be required of me by law. So help me God.” Ibid., 513. 1 he unabashedly proclaimed the school to be pro-Confederate.2 Ten days later, Johnson received the minsters again this time with Robert B.C. Howell speaking for the group on many points concerning the Loyalty Oath. Howell phrased his response entirely in his own words, and seemed to speak only for himself. This is, however, the only recorded response despite several of the other ministers having a national reputation in their own right. Howell’s response can be taken as the attitude of the entire group. He offered seven specific problems with the oath that kept him from assenting to it. These ranged from matters of wording to a feigned lack of understanding of what the oath might imply. Howell’s most pointed response to the oath stated his preferred position on the matter: I have ever scrupulously conformed myself to the government under which I have lived. I do this as a religious duty I have never knowingly violated and law of the Federal government now established… I intend not to resist the “powers that be,” but to comply with their requisition as far as they do not come in conflict with my duty to God.3 Johnson responded to this letter by ordering Lieutenant Colonel Richard McClain to hold the reverends RBC Howell, Collins Elliot, Reuben Ford, Edmund Sehon, and William Sawrie under arrest until they were willing to swear the oath or could be transferred beyond Union lines. Johnson further underlined his order by sending another to McClain later on the 28th directing him to keep the ministers away from visitors, and without any tokens or luxuries that might be brought to them. In Johnson’s words, “These men were not sent to the Penitentiary there to be kept as objects of especial attention from traitors, 2 John Windrow, “Collins D. Elliott and the Nashville Female Academy,” Tennessee Historical Magazine, 1932, 96; Andrew Johnson, The Papers of Andrew Johnson: Volume 5, 1861-1862, vol. 5 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 487–489. 3 Johnson, The Papers of Andrew Johnson: Volume 5, 1861-1862, 5:513–516. 2 nor to be lionized by a class of people, who, if properly dealt with, would be allowed the privilege of expressing their sympathy only within the same place of confinement.”4 Johnson followed his meeting with the ministers of Nashville by holding a dialogue with the Chaplain of Tennessee’s State Penitentiary. According to the Nashville Union, Chaplain William Wharton was present, but not involved with the ministers’ refusal to swear the oath. Once the ministers were arrested, Johnson turned his attention to Wharton. Johnson’s ire seemed to be up and he approached Wharton more directly than he had the other minsters. Johnson