UPON THE ALTAR OF THE NATION

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 nation as 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.