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Religious Rebels: the Religious Views and Motivations of Confederate Generals

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Religious Rebels: the Religious Views and Motivations of Confederate Generals Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 10-3-2012 12:00 AM Religious Rebels: The Religious Views and Motivations of Confederate Generals Robert H. Croskery The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Nancy Rhoden The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in History A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Robert H. Croskery 2012 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the History of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Croskery, Robert H., "Religious Rebels: The Religious Views and Motivations of Confederate Generals" (2012). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 1171. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/1171 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Religious Rebels: The Religious Views and Motivations of Confederate Generals in the American Civil War (Thesis format: Monograph) by Robert Hugh Christopher Stephen Croskery Graduate Program in History A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Western University London, Ontario, Canada © Robert Hugh Christopher Stephen Croskery 2013 ABSTRACT During the American Civil War, widely held Christian values and doctrines affected Confederate generals’ understanding and conduct of the war. This study examines the extent and the manner of religion’s influence on the war effort and the minds and lives of Confederate generals. Letters, diaries, and memoirs are used in addition to war reports and secondary sources to understand the range and complexity of this topic. Based on the supposition that each person’s religion is a unique relationship between a human being and his or her Creator, this study analyses the uniqueness of the generals’ religious beliefs using biographical details. Religion had a variety of effects on these Southern military leaders. Some high- ranking generals, such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, embraced the virtues of faith, hope and charity as the basis of their religious behaviour. Others such as Jubal Early simply used religion to instill morality and discipline in their soldiers. Confederate generals possessed religious convictions about slavery that enabled them to support or ignore the peculiar institution. Their understanding of Providence gave them confidence in the power of their armies, and in their petitions to God. Many Confederate generals performed their duty not only through a sense of civil obligation but also religious mission. Pious generals led their men and fought the war according to Christian ethics. Many Confederate military leaders died fighting not only for their country, but for their God. Religious beliefs, specifically a belief in absolute Providence, encouraged some generals to be reckless with their lives and to believe death was not the end of their existence, but rather a new beginning. This study examines some of the manifold relationships between religion and warfare in the Civil War South and argues that an understanding of the religious faith and practices of generals needs to be taken into account when writing military history. By integrating and comparing the religion of different Confederate generals this study offers a greater awareness of how religion influenced the conduct of the generals and the Civil War as a whole. ii Keywords: American Civil War; Religion; Southern war effort; Confederate generals; Christianity; Robert E. Lee; Stonewall Jackson; Leonidas Polk; James Ewell Brown Stuart; William Nelson Pendleton; war; Providence; slavery; mortality; Nineteenth- Century United States church history. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iv INTRODUCTION. .1 CHAPTER 1: Faith, Hope and Charity. 43 CHAPTER 2: Morality and Slavery. ..118 CHAPTER 3: Providence and Prayer. ..179 CHAPTER 4: Duty and Leadership. .237 CHAPTER 5: The Morality of War and Mortality. ..288 CONCLUSION. 346 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 375 VITA. 433 iv 1 Introduction The vast number of books written about the American Civil War give but moderate attention to the role of religion. Studies of various facets of religion, including the role of chaplains, churches, preachers, sermons, and revivals, on both the Northern and Southern home fronts and in their respective armies, exist. Individual generals are the subject of numerous biographies and monographs, in particular, Ulysses Grant, Robert E. Lee, William Tecumseh Sherman, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and numerous other well-known generals. Other lessor known generals forms the subject of one or more biographies. Seldom, however, have the subjects of religion and Civil War generals been combined. James McPherson and James Cooper believe that “...despite several good studies, the role of religion in the Union and the Confederacy needs more attention.”1 For the South, religion is of key importance because, as Drew Faust states, “The most fundamental source of legitimation for the Confederacy was Christianity.”2 In the case of the common soldiers, several recently published books do much to illuminate their religious beliefs and the role such beliefs played in the Civil War.3 For both Northern and Southern generals, numerous insights are presented in biographies of individual generals.4 However, to date no study of either Union or Confederate generals as a group deals with their religious views and how these beliefs influenced their conception and conduct of the Civil War. 1James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper, Jr., Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 6. 2Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 22. 3James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Steven E. Woodworth, While God is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001). 4James Irwin Robertson, Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend (New York: Macmillan Publishing USA, 1997); Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934-35), vols. 1-4; Joseph Howard Parks, General Leonidas Polk, C. S. A.: The Fighting Bishop (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962). 2 The present work addresses how religion, specifically Christianity, influenced Confederate generals in their understanding of the war, and how their religious beliefs shaped their conduct of the war. I argue that religious motifs, themes and ideals contextualized their conception and conduct of the war, and that an understanding of these motifs, themes and ideals is essential to understanding their motivations and their perception of the outcome of the conflict. In other words, religion matters. It is not a topic that can be aptly dealt with in a chapter or two in a book on the Confederacy, or only discussed when an author is writing a biography of a chaplain. Instead, religious beliefs and practices were central in the lives of Confederate generals, whether they were pious, such as Stonewall Jackson, or impious, such as Jubal Anderson Early. Currently some scholars tend to marginalize religion, and downplay its importance in the past. Lewis O. Saum, a historian of the antebellum United States, writes that “Frequently, modern scholars show secular inclinations, and they show impatience with what they deem unallowable amounts of religious expression. Sometimes, for example, they edit diaries in such a way as to leave the wheat of political or economic content while removing the chaff of religious fancies.”5 The same tendency can be seen in regard to military biographies of Confederate generals. In many, religion seems peripheral to the generals’ concerns. However, by reading the unedited primary sources, a far different picture emerges, one that substantiates my thesis that an understanding of religious motifs, themes and ideals contextualized the generals’ understanding of the war. In essence, they acted as a lens through which the generals viewed the conflict, and this religious lens had a discernible impact on how they waged the war, how they perceived it, and how they reacted to their eventual defeat. This thesis will be demonstrated through an analysis of the most prominent religious themes that were found in the primary and secondary sources on the generals. These themes are faith, hope, charity, morality, slavery, Providence, prayer, duty, leadership, war and death. When I began my research I kept an open mind as to what I would find in the sources. I did not force my own perceived ideas on how to organize this study. These eleven themes were far and away the most important subjects that had religious significance in the writings and the lives of the 5Lewis O. Saum, The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1980), xx. 3 generals. Even secular sounding themes, such as duty and leadership, had strong religious undertones, and in the case of the most religious generals, such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, these themes cannot be understood without reference to religious
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