Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War

by Harry S. Stout

Overview

A profound and timely examination of the moral underpinnings of the War Between the States

The Civil War was not only a war of armies but also a war of ideas, in which Union and Confederacy alike identified itself as a moral nation with God on its side. In this watershed book, Harry S. Stout measures the gap between those claims and the war’s actual conduct. Ranging from the home front to the trenches and drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Stout explores the lethal mix of propaganda and ideology that came to justify slaughter on and off the battlefield. At a time when our country is once again at war, Upon the Altar of the Nation is a deeply necessary book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143038764
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/27/2007
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Harry S. Stout is the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University and the author of The New England Soul. He has received an NEH Research Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, among other awards. Currently the editor of the twenty-seven volume series of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Professor Stout has coedited the seventeen-volume series Religion and American Life designed for public schools.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xi
	Prologue	1
Part I	Preparation: Patriots All November 1860 to July 1861
Chapter 1	"The Spirit of the South is Rising"	9
Chapter 2	"Let the Strife Begin"	17
Chapter 3	"Our Flag Carries ... American History"	26
Chapter 4	"The Day of the Populace"	35
Chapter 5	"To Recognize Our Dependence Upon God"	47
Chapter 6	"The Church Will Sound the Trumpets"	53
Part II	Romanticization: The Making of Heroes July 1861 to March 1862
Chapter 7	The Battle of Bull Run: "A Total and Disgraceful Rout"	61
Chapter 8	Triumphalism: "Adorned by the Name of God"	73
Chapter 9	"Will Not the Martyrs Be Blessed ...?"	82
Chapter 10	"To Humble Ourselves Before God"	95
Chapter 11	"Is It Not Grand ...?"	100
Chapter 12	"The Popular Heart"	110
Chapter 13	"Religion Has Grown Warlike"	118
Part III	Descent: Hard War, Spilled Blood April 1862 to October 1862
Chapter 14	"What Scenes of Bloodshed"	127
Chapter 15	"God Wills This Contest"	139
Chapter 16	Antietam: "The Horrors of a Battlefield"	150
Chapter 17	"Broken Hearts Cannot be Photographed"	156
Part IV	Justification: The Emancipation War October 1862 to May 1863
Chapter 18	"All Who Die for Country Now, Die Also for Humanity"	167
Chapter 19	Lincoln, Emancipation, and Total War	182
Chapter 20	Fredericksburg: "So Foolhardy an Adventure"	191
Chapter 21	"God Has Granted Us a Happy New Year"	199
Chapter 22	"As Savage as Savages"	210
Part V	Transformation: Hearts Invested May 1863 to April 1864
Chapter 23	Chancellorsville: "The Chamber of Death"	223
Chapter 24	Gettysburg: "Field of Blood, and Death"	231
Chapter 25	"For the Sake of the Cause"	238
Chapter 26	"A Political Worship"	248
Chapter 27	"The Rock of Chickamauga"	259
Chapter 28	"In That Immortal Field"	265
Chapter 29	"The Present Unholy War"	277
Chapter 30	"From Head to Heart"	286
Part VI	Proportion: The Soldiers' Total War May 1864 to August 1864
Chapter 31	"I Can Only Think of Hell Upon Earth"	295
Chapter 32	"No Pledge to Make But Action"	308
Chapter 33	"The Most Interesting Men in the Country"	321
Chapter 34	"If It Takes All Summer"	329
Chapter 35	"June 3. Cold Harbor. I was Killed."	338
Part VII	Discrimination: A Civilian War August 1864 to February 1865
Chapter 36	"The Pious Men Will be Held Up As the Greatest of Patriots"	353
Chapter 37	"If They Want Peace They ... Must Stop the War"	360
Chapter 38	"Red October": "The Work of Destruction"	375
Chapter 39	"A Vote for Principle, for Conscience, for Christ"	386
Chapter 40	"I can Make This March, and Make Georgia Howl!"	393
Chapter 41	"Uphold the Cause and Strengthen the Hands of the Faithful"	406
Chapter 42	"Vengeance Upon South Carolina"	413
Part VIII	Reconciliation: Making an End to Build a Future
Chapter 43	"Let Us Strive on to Finish the Work We Are in"	425
Chapter 44	"Richmond! Babylon is Fallen!!"	434
Chapter 45	"The Man Dies, But the Cause Lives"	448
	Afterword	457
	Acknowledgments	463
	Notes	467
	Bibliography	513
	Index	536

Editorial Reviews

A triumph of scholarship, of interpretation, and (in the deepest sense) of historical understanding. (John Demos, National Book Award–winning author of The Unredeemed Captive)

Thought provoking . . . asks many of the right questions. (James M. McPherson, The New York Review of Books)

From the Publisher

In the Civil War, Union and Confederate soldiers alike marched to battle believing God was on their side. Stout, professor of American religious history at Yale (The New England Soul), artfully and eloquently examines the evolving rhetoric of warfare, both Northern and Confederate, within the rubric of "the just war" theory of conflict. Stout dissects such public documents as editorials, sermons and speeches, and private documents like diaries and letters, to trace the trajectory of both sides' rationales for war. But he also makes clear that most high-minded utterances obscured, rather than clarified, the economic issues that lay at the heart of the conflict. Stout argues that even today the moral justifications for the carnage ring louder than do the sordid dollar-and-cents realities that underlay sectional differences. As Stout shows, the Civil War remains with us today as an exercise of civil religion: altars of the two conflicting faiths stand side-by-side at Gettysburg and other venues, sacralized slices of patriotism painted in shades of gray or blue. Stout's contention that even the North engaged in immoral acts in prosecuting the war will rattle many, but the questions he raises are important in an era when humanitarian justifications for war are increasingly common. 24 b&w illus., 5 maps, not seen by PW. (On sale Jan. 23) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

The publisher has great expectations for Yale religious historian Stout's account of the Civil War as righteous cause. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Was the Civil War just? Both sides thought so, writes religious historian Stout (American Religious History/Yale Univ.), but only one was correct by any modern calculus. There are dangers in viewing long-past actions through modern eyes; what would have seemed perfectly natural to Caesar is today's enormity. Stout reckons that "just-war theory" has been operational, though, for many centuries, and some of the concerns of those who fought in the Civil War remain of concern today. More remote are the notions of manhood that motivated behavior on both sides of the line, though any West Pointer will understand the agonies Southern cadets went through in determining what sort of duty and honor were owed to what country. (Stout notes that 21 Southern cadets remained to serve in the Union army, whereas all Southern students at Princeton went home.) Both sides searched for signs that theirs was the just one; both declared that God was with them. Had it been merely a bloodletting over states' rights, Stout suggests, then neither side would have had much moral claim; but the fact that slavery was central to the argument and that the Union war widened-if only eventually-into an abolitionist one changed the equation. Along the way, visiting one moral dilemma after another, Stout remarks on Grant's ending of prisoner exchanges, for instance, which came about because returned rebels violated parole to return to the ranks, and Grant reckoned that he could afford more men in prison than the Confederates could, a moral tap dance if ever there was one; and he notes that at a time of pandemic anguish during Lincoln's second inauguration, the Christian right lamented not so much bloodshed or a broken nationas the fact that Andrew Johnson turned up drunk. Of interest to students of ethics and religious history; Civil War specialists will not find much new, but Stout offers an interesting way of looking at well-known events.

Kirkus Reviews