Faith of Presidents, Generals, and Ordinary Folks

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The religious beliefs and depth of faith of some of the iconic figures of the war provide a view into society of the time while keeping in mind that they are not necessarily representative of the broader population in all ways.  Based on the level of religious adherence in the population as a whole and the sectional nature of all faiths at the time of the war with the exception of Catholicism, it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect idealistic consistency.

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Abraham Lincoln:  Lincoln is a favorite reference to include in sermons even today. Most of these accounts have been passed down in sermons across many generations each using the previous reference as a source until the original source is all but lost perpetuating a saintly sort of mythology that doesn’t have much basis in fact.

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Lincoln was raised in a Baptist family in Lincoln City, Indiana and his step mother in particular was an ardent believer with whom he had a close relationship. She died when he was a teenager.  He moved to New Salem when he was 14 and never became associated with a church after his childhood. As a young man he read enlightenment philosophers like Thomas Paine. In 1834 he is said to have written a critique of Christianity based in part on The Age of Reason that didn’t survive and is rumored to have been destroyed by one or more of his associates. Lincoln throughout his political career came under fairly intense political pressure to make some sort of confession of faith but wouldn’t although he was Biblically knowledgeable, probably studied the Bible, and used Biblical imagery and references in his some of his speeches, especially when president, although that could also be explained as simply speaking to a part of his audience.

Those who were closest to him throughout his life viewed him as a deist or, in the terminology of the time, a free thinker or infidel.

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Lifelong friend Ward Lamon said “Never in all that time did he let fall from his lips or his pen an expression which remotely implied the slightest faith in Jesus as the son of God and the Savior of men."  Business partner William Herndon wrote, “Mr. Lincoln's religion is too well known to me to allow for even a shadow of a doubt; he is or was a Theist & a Rationalist, denying all extraordinary - supernatural inspiration or revelation (1). At one time in his life, he was an elevated Pantheist doubting the immortality of the soul as the Christian world understands that term. He believed that the soul lost its identity and was immortal as a force. Subsequent to this he rose to the belief of a God, and this is all the change he ever underwent. I speak knowing what I say” (1).  Both these men wrote biographies of Lincoln.

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After Lincoln’s death, he was recast mainly by the New England clergy not simply as a Christian but as a sort of saint.  There specifically was and remains a conversion story at Gettysburg that concludes, “I then and there consecrated myself to Christ. Yes, I do love Jesus!”  The problem is that it never happened and was written by someone who had never met him.  There was a common saying at the time that “Lincoln became a Christian six months after he died.” (2 pp. 33-34)

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There is a general challenge in studying Lincoln and that is fake quotes most of which don’t even sound like his writing or speaking style.  These propagated from the time of his death until around the turn of the century. Ira Cardiff wrote a book in 1903, which was previously cited, principally to debunk much of this. Another example of one of these fake quotes is “I have never known a worthwhile man who became too big for his boots or his Bible” (2 p. 33).  They extend on into many other topics making Lincoln quotations something that should always be checked carefully.

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US Grant: Grant was born in Ohio in 1822 to Methodist parents who were politically Whigs. He was not forced to attend church as a child and never joined a church later although he would periodically attend the Methodist Church with his family. It is not clear what religious beliefs he actually held to (3 pp. 6-7) and his son described him as an agnostic (4 p. 10). Grant was not a successful man before the war and wound up marrying into the Dent family of Missouri marrying Julia in 1844. The Grants lived for a period of time on the Dent’s 850 acre plantation, along with a significant slave population, but he wound up giving up farming.  In 1860 he moved to Illinois to work for his younger brothers in the family leather goods business. He was largely apolitical and voted for either party at different times. If he held to any political standard, it was that of a nationalist.

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William Tecumseh Sherman: Sherman was born in 1820 to a politically prominent family in Ohio. His father was on the Ohio Supreme Court but died in 1829. He was then raised by Thomas Ewing who was a state senator and a prominent Whig. His original family was Presbyterian and his second family was Catholic. He said “my immediate family is strongly Catholic, I am not and cannot be”(5). This is somewhat interesting and notable as there were very few Catholics in the Midwest at the time and the deep association between the Catholic population and the Democratic Party was becoming fairly well established. Sherman was not a religious man and is best seen through his actions which are appropriately summarized in the following exchange of letters between him and his wife:

In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife (from his Collected Works) he wrote that his purpose in the war was: "Extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the [Southern] people." His wife Ellen wrote back that her fondest wish was for a war "of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like the Swine into the sea."(6)

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Jefferson Davis:  Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808 not far from the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. He was from an Episcopalian family, which was rare amongst the population as a whole, but more common within the aristocracy. His secondary education was at St Rose Priori which was a Catholic school run by the Dominican Order in Washington County, Kentucky. He was the only non-Catholic at the school and, although he never became a Catholic, he held the church in high regard throughout his life. (7)

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During the war he corresponded with Pope Pius IX who was the only head of state to recognize the Confederacy. After the war when Davis was a prisoner at Fortress Monroe Virginia, the Pope continued to correspond with Davis and sent a picture to him with the hand-written inscription, “Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest”.  Along with the picture, a crown of thorns woven by his wife hung in his cell. In the end, neither Davis nor other Confederate leaders were ever charged with anything, although Davis demanded to be tried, as prevailing legal opinion was that secession was constitutional and legal which would have then inferred that the invasion of the South was illegal. US Supreme Court Justice Salmon P Chase in 1867 is quoted as saying “If you bring these leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not a rebellion. His [Jefferson Davis] capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason.”(7)

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Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina adopted a Black child named Jim Limber during the war.  When Mrs. Davis saw the child being beaten she came to his defense and took him into the Confederate White house. They were separated after the family was captured at the end of the war and were never able to re-establish contact although Varina Davis said they still prayed for him every day. (8 pp. 104-06)

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Robert E Lee: Lee was born in 1806 in Stratford Country Virginia and had an Episcopalian background which he held to throughout his life although he was not confirmed into the Episcopalian church until age 46. Lee’s father fell upon severe financial problems and wound up in debtor’s prison.  He moved permanently to the West Indies in 1812 and Lee’s siblings and mother were largely supported by other family members. Within the Episcopalian church of the time there were two camps one of which was more deistic, followed by his father, while the other was more evangelical, although this doesn’t necessarily correlate closely to modern evangelicalism. Lee’s wife and mother were more on the evangelical side and Lee appeared to gradually grow toward this view throughout his adult life (9 pp. 139-50). The Religious Life of Robert E Lee by R. David Cox specifically deals with Lee’s religion and how it affected his public and private decision making.

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By virtually all accounts General Lee was a devout Christian who lived an honorable and exemplary life. He was a Unionist until faced with the invasion of his homeland and opposed slavery having freed slaves from his father-in-law’s estate. Critics of Lee and the South will point out that he didn’t support immediate suffrage for freedmen nor a modern concept of racial equality but neither did anyone else of the time period except those who saw these things as a way to acquire and retain power. Lee’s attitudes towards race are best exemplified by an incident that took place in Richmond shortly after the war:

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“In St. Paul’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, June, 1865, …When the priest offered a call to Holy Communion, a tall, well-dressed black man approached the communion table first ahead of the white congregation, causing shock. For an awkward moment the congregation did not move. Then Lee rose, walked to the communion rail and knelt near the black man…this had a magic effect upon the other communicants…who went forward to the communion table.”(10)

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These critics of course would be the same people who would mount an unyielding defense of the moral superiority of the likes of General Sherman. Lee, like Davis, recognized the Catholic Church for its defense of the Confederate Nation who told a visitor while pointing to his own picture of the Pope, “the only sovereign…in Europe who recognized our poor Confederacy”(7)

The following is a prayer written by General Lee from the Truman Library. It’s both simple and vast in its personal implications:

Help me to be, to think, to act what is right because it is right; make me truthful, honest, and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me."   Robert E Lee (11)

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Thomas Stonewall Jackson:  Of the notable figures of the war Jackson was the most pious and religiously complex.  He was married twice, both times to the daughters of Presbyterian ministers.  His first wife died in childbirth and it was during this relationship when he was an instructor at VMI where his faith became unusually devout. Jackson was a committed conservative Calvinist and attended the Lexington Presbyterian Church. He attended virtually every church function although he was known for falling asleep. He was a relatively large man for the time that had a number of chronic physical ailments (12 p. ch.2). He kept the Sabbath entirely free from any activities including reading a newspaper of even a secular conversation. His strongly Calvinistic belief system caused him to see all situations as having been determined by God’s sovereignty and was therefore, very fatalistic in battle.

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Jackson owned two slaves but under very unusual circumstances.  Both individuals had masters that died and asked Jackson to buy them and they would work for him for a number of hours for their freedom. Although saying that he didn’t need any help, he concluded that respecting their proposal was the Christian thing to do. Jackson organized, supported, and ran a Black church or Sunday school where he taught people to read and write (12 p. ch. 2). Jackson, like Lee, was a Unionist but had primary loyalty to his native state and was not a believer in a centralized nation state. When Lincoln called for troops from Virginia to be involved in an invasion of the Deep South, he saw resistance as both justified and a duty. He was not a supporter of slavery but saw that, and other external circumstances, as being the result of God’s directive or permissive will that was not his to dispute. For someone of more of an activist bent who sees their purpose in life as “changing the world”, Jackson’s neo-Calvinist belief system would seem almost unimaginable but it was very sincere and generally aligns with historical Christian orthodoxy prior to modern American Evangelicalism.

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In comparing the six men, there are stark contrasts. Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman, while having some level of religious background, were not religious men having very consciously turned from their cultural faith backgrounds. While Lincoln was a successful corporate lawyer, Grant and Sherman were not successful in civilian life which is a common characteristic of the heroes of statism. The three confederate icons were all devout Christian men, followers of orthodox Christian belief systems, who were also highly educated and accomplished in their own lives apart from their roles in government. Davis, Lee, and Jackson were religiously somewhat different from the typical Southerner of the time in that they were part of orthodox faiths as opposed to the Evangelical faiths but the Evangelical faiths in the Old South were orthodox in many if not most respects and should not be seen as aligning closely to modern Evangelicalism. It’s also notable that these men suffered significant personal hardship throughout the course of their lives in addition to the war but, as opposed to falling away from their faith, their faith grew stronger because what it was founded in wasn’t fleeting or dependent on the external environment.

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Apart from the leaders, the Northern protestant population was declining as a percentage and marginally remaining constant in absolute numbers with people drifting away from the highly political progressive churches and perhaps Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman could all be considered examples of this. In the South the Baptists and Methodists were numerically dominant and during the War there was a prolonged revival amongst Confederate soldiers that is documented in the book, Christ in the Camp by John William Jones that is believed to have created a good number of pastors and active lay people after the war (13). This could partially explain why the drop in religious participation immediately after the war in the North was far more pronounced than in the South despite the relative conditions of the two regions.

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The southern armies are frequently characterized as having a very high desertion rate.  According to Desertion During the Civil War by Ella Lonn originally published in 1928, which provides a detailed analysis of participation in the war from both sides along with information on conscription and desertion, the confederate armies had a desertion rate of about 10% which was roughly similar to the Union Army. Desertions in the North were sometimes linked to events like the Emancipation Proclamation that triggered mass desertions (14 pp. 225-235). Some of the Southern numbers may have been because many of the soldiers were still trying to raise crops to feed their families. As to why the confederate soldier fought, those who documented their motives cited a belief in federalism or states’ rights most typically but they were also fighting an enemy on their own land that showed little mercy to anyone.  Noted Civil War historian Shelby Foote frequently referred to a story where a Union officer asked a low ranking confederate prisoner why he was fighting and he said “Sir, because you are here”.  For most confederate soldiers that would largely sum things up.

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Bibliography

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1. Banks, Adelle E. Houston Chronicle. [Online] April 14, 2011. [Cited: 15 2020, September.] https://www.chron.com/life/houston-belief/article/Long-lost-letter-sheds-light-on-Lincoln-s-1685061.php.

2. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. Lincoln Unmasked. New York, New York : Three Rivers Press, 2006.

3. Simpson, Brook D. US Grant Triumphs over Adversity. Houghton & Mifflin : Zenith Press, 2000.

4. Waugh, Joan. US Grant American Hero American Myth. s.l. : University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

5. Blaine, James G. Hon. James G. Blaine. North American Review. December 1888, pp. 616, 624.

6. DiLorenzo, Thomas. Lew Rockwell.com. [Online] February 12, 2003. [Cited: May 4, 2020.] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2003/02/thomas-dilorenzo/what-lincolns-army-did-to-the-indians/.

7. Cathey, Boyd D. Reckoning. [Online] May 27, 2019. https://www.reckonin.com/boyd-cathey/remembering-jefferson-davis?fbclid=IwAR0gDPXa23xziLqjJIob5g0VRoviXB2opBXpleDxFb0uUeS11HUU-Mmbfms.

8. Kennedy, James Ronald and Kennedy, Walter donald. The South was Right. Gretna, Louisiana : Pelican Publishing Company, 2014.

9. Cox, R. David. The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee. Grand Rapids, Michigan : Eerdman's Publishing Company, 2017.

10. Kennedy, James Ronald. Abbeville Institute. [Online] April 27, 2020. [Cited: May.] https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/no-comparison-between-grant-and-lee/.

11. Lee, Robert E. Order of Centurions. [Online] October 12, 1870. http://orderofcenturions.org/robertelee.html.

12. Gwynne, S.C. Rebel Yell. New York, New York : Scribner, 2014.

13. Jones, John William. Christ in the Camp. s.l. : Sprinkle Publications, 1904.

14. Lonn, Ella. Desertion During the Civil War. s.l. : University of Nebraska Press, 1928.