The Civil War & civil religion

"Everyone must obey state authorities, because no authority exists without God's God's permission, and the existing authorities have been put there by God" (Romans 13:1 TEV).

Last week, we summarized the first consideration of the Civil War: the proportionate enormity of causalities and the attending consequences to so many from that blood-drenched experience. The second great consequence of the Civil War was the assertion of rule by law and the end of secessionist ideology. Democracies have profound difficulty with the issue of secession. While "liberal" democratic theorists address almost every conceivable dimension of freedom, individual rights, and the protection of minority groups, the question of secession hardly ever comes up.

In fact, as ethicist Allen Buchanan points out, it is one of the greatest ironies of liberal thought - to join or not to join or to secede - is rarely addressed. The consequences are too threatening. Did Norwqy have a right to secede from Sweden? Does Quebec have a right to secede from Canada? Ultimately, secession is a moral question without a formula to discover a definitive answer. Did the South have a right to secede? Yes and no. Only a civil war would settle the issue once and for all. Whatever the defeated confederacy may have retained after defeat and reunion, they never again mounted a serious cry for secession. Nor has anyone else.

Outside of its effects on American society, the Civil War had international ramifications that the parochial American historians have been slow to pick up on but which cannot be gainsaid. In international terms, the Civil War represented a compelling example to the world that a liberal, democratic nationalism could endure as effectively as divine right monarchies or despotic tyrannies.

And this, at a time when liberalism and democracy were not the presumed choice of Western society as they are today. The American Revolution proved a free people could revolt. But it could not prove they could hold together. Only time and severe internal challenge could demonstrate the immutability of a democratic revolution. That required a second revolution - a civil war.

As momentous as the achievements and consequences of the Civil War were in their time and place, it is important to recognize that they did not render necessary or inevitable the subsequent status of the war as the American phenomenon; other events or movements MIGHT have enjoyed that status. In his book "Crucible of War'" historian Fred Anderson makes a compelling case for the Seven Years' War as Euro-America's first "world war," and, far more important than the American Revolution, a transformative event "that decisively shaped American history, as well as the histories of Europe and the Atlantic world in general . . ."

Among other things, the Seven Years' War explains why this essay is written in English and not in French. World War II could also occupy the hallowed status of the defining American phenomenon as its 16 million servicemen and over 300,000 killed decisively inaugurated the "American Century." But neither these, or many other contenders, have displaced the Civil War in the American consciousness. To understand why, we must place statistics and geo-political realities along subsequent memory and our collective consciousness as a nation-state. (For example, General-President Eisenhower, though originally from Kansas, chose retirement on a farm adjacent to the Gettysburgh battlefield.)

Something of the past of the Civil War speaks profoundly in its present. But war? Lying at the center of the remembered past of the Civil War, we would suggest, is a tragedy and an epiphany. The tragedy is the legacy of ongoing racism and the politics of what supremacy, and the epiphany is a victorious triumph of American civil religion.

First the tragedy. If the Civil War had the salutary effect of abolishing chattel slavery once and for all, it failed to counter racism at all. While the realities of civil war produced universal emancipation, it preserved memory erased many of the moral gains intended by some abolitionists. Chief of these was racial equality. Both during the war and later in white America memory, the Civil War was never about equality. President Lincoln's favored solution to emancipated slaves was colonization in Central America or Liberia.

In remarks to a gathering of "colored men" on August 14, 1862, Lincoln pushed his scheme based on the "fact" that "but for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other." The white men who suffered," Lincoln continued, "would not want to live with black people because they were not equal: even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race."

The Civil War freed the slave legally, only to enslave him again economically, politically, and residentially. As David Potter wrote nearly 40 years ago, "the issue as it stood at the time [of the Civil War], unfortunately. was less a question whether the Negro should have status as an equal than a dispute over what form his inferior status should take." By failing to embrace the cause of equality, the Civil War produced a nationalism and a union that would require a revolution in civl rights to resolve the central dilemma - a resolution that is still far from being fully resolved.

In his remarkable book "Race and Reunion'" David W. Blight describes what white and black Americans chose to remember about the Civil War and, equally important, what they "forgot." Remembered was the bravery and camaraderie of what soldiers and home fronts on both sides of the conflict. "Freedom," "honor," "duty," and the "brotherhood" of warriors rang loudly at Memorial Day parades and veterans' reunions. But it was an attenuated freedom in which the forces of white supremacy and white sectional overwhelmed the emancipationist vision of equality in the national culture and its cultural example. To give just one example, African American veterans were not welcome to the parades - they would have ruined the reunions.

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