Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
"The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if
the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted
in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor
safety." --Thomas Paine
Let's be frank. America is God's chosen land.
Pilgrims. Puritans. Manifest Destiny. Putting down the Southern 'rebellion' and thereby saving liberty and democracy for the whole world. Saving Europe and the world from fascism in WWII. Bringing the Evil Empire to its knees. Its an impressive record of doing God's work, don't you think?
It's obvious that Providence wanted the USA to be strong and to stretch from sea to shining sea, from the Bering Strait and Arctic Circle to the Caribbean, from the Northern Atlantic to the isles of the southern and western Pacific. Had the ill-conceived Southern confederacy been allowed to exist, tearing God's chosen bastion of freedom apart and thereby rendering the residue of the USA impotent and only several times the size of most other countries -- the world today would be a horrid place -- a world of bigots, repression, jack booted tyrants, warlords, and anarchy.
Lets not forget betray, deceit, slaughter, oppression, imposed will, race and ethical intolerance, and a host of other God given, old fashion, American virtues.
world today would be a horrid place -- a world of bigots, repression, jack booted tyrants, warlords, and anarchy.
None of my doing, but all to my benefit. When the rules come down against us, we simply smack somebody. We might someday find our comeuppance. When we do, I hope we have the grace to accept that eventuality in the same spirit as we imposed it.
We write the history, and when it can be wrested from our charred fingers, someone else will. It was ever thus and shall be evermore.
Arrogant. Absolutely!
May I commend to you the writings of Robert Ardrey? Skip The African Genesis, but go through, at least, <u>The Social Contract.</u> When you've waded through that, work on The Territorial Imperative and <u>The Hunting Hypothesis.</u>
Man is a complex animal; in some ways predictable, in some ways not. We are the same, but with subtle differences. This is not black, white, red, brown, or yellow, but the difference between the Serb and the Slav, the Croat and the Bosnian, the Irish and English, the North and the South. We have all developed along different lines, but we all remain human.
These human frailties are written into history. While we read history and note events, we often forget that we are creatures who inherited intuitive memories. These memories are what generate hostilities, enmities, and comradeship. And we can't do anything about it, but recognize who we are and why we feel the way we do.
It boggles.
Ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
A lieutenant... in the 16th New York,... wrote in 1862 that "the cause for which we battle is one in which we can in righteousness claim the protection of heaven. Humanity is largely interested in the issues of this monstrous rebellion hence He who is the embodiment of humanity will bestow in great abundance His blessings upon his and our cause."
Lincoln claimed that he was saving democracy for the world by subjugating the South. There are those among us who have echoed that claim.
And how many times have we all heard (or perhaps even said) that the Lord kept the Union intact so we could save the world during WWII?
I have also heard it said that such shows a total lack of imagination and a blindered perspective at best, and extreme arrogance and perhaps blatant ignorance at worst.
Did God want the the South to be subjugated by the North?
And Hal, a personal question for you. What do you think of the phrase, 'Volence never settles anything?'
Sincerely,
Unionblue
(Message edited by Unionblue on January 18, 2005)
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
It seems the human need for moral justification has not only created a Lincoln that didn't exist, but also laid the sandy foundation that the Union cause was God's cause, upon which most force union apologists build their house of glory hallelujah CW beliefs.
Here's a good example of this in a sermon given in 1976 by M.G. Romney:
There is an example of the way to pray and of an answer to prayer in the life of President Lincoln. General Daniel E. Sickles had learned that before the portentous battle of Gettysburg, upon the result of which, perhaps, the fate of the nation hung, President Lincoln was apparently free from the oppressive care which frequently weighed him down. After it was all past, the general asked Lincoln how that was. He said:
“Well, I will tell you how it was. In the pinch of your campaign up there, when everybody seemed panic-stricken and nobody could tell what was going to happen, oppressed by the gravity of our affairs, I went to my room one day and locked the door and got down on my knees before Almighty God and prayed to him mightily for victory at Gettysburg. I told Him that this war was His, and our cause His cause, but we could not stand another Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville. Then and there I made a solemn vow to Almighty God that if He would stand by our boys at Gettysburg, I would stand by Him, and He did stand by you boys, and I will stand by Him. And after that, I don’t know how it was, and I cannot explain it, soon a sweet comfort crept into my soul. The feeling came that God had taken the whole business into His own hands, and that things would go right at Gettysburg, and that is why I had no fears about you.” (John Wesley Hill, Abraham Lincoln—Man of God, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927, pp. 339–40.)
"The Union of our States, the hope of our fathers, and the heritage of the world is in imminent danger." With stirring words like these, the Chicago clergy undertook an often-forgotten task. They went beyond their calling as peacemakers and prepared people's minds and hearts for war. The clergy's sermons blended religion and patriotism to prepare Chicagoans to sacrifice everything for a holy cause: preserving the Union in the American Civil War....
Clergymen did much to convince and reassure the people that the coming war was God's will and that their sacrifices would be righteous in the eyes of God....
Reverend W. N. Patton of Chicago's First Congregational Church preached patriotism, urging his congregation to pray for their leaders. The following Sunday his sermon, "The Suddenness of Revolutions," reassured his people that "God [would] advance his cause on earth" through the present struggle. He was the first of many to preach that God was on the North's side, and that they were instruments in carrying out God's will.
On January 25, 1861, Reverend Henry Cox addressed the Ladies' City Mission on the southern revolution: "No greater calamity could befall the people of this country than a dissolution of the Union. [the North must] Teach them [secessionists] respect. Prayer alone will not accomplish this. Faith and works must go together."
Reverend W. N. Patton of the First Congregational Church preached that enlisting was God's will: "God's providence [is] bringing about great changes for the good and progress of humanity. The
Reverend W. N. Patton preached to members of the First Congregational Church that God supported the Union.
[The Chicago clergy] had been praying for peace. But when Fort Sumter was attacked on April 12, 1861, their cry for peace turned to a cry for war. Chicago's ministers had made preserving the Union a holy cause, and when Lincoln called for troops, they declared that fighting had God's blessing.
Reverend W. N. Patton of the First Congregational Church preached that enlisting was God's will: "God's providence [is] bringing about great changes for the good and progress of humanity. The present struggle is one in which every Christian may rise from his knees and shoulder his rifle."
...Reverend Collyer of Second Unitarian Church compared fighting to heaven. He considered it "as glorious to go into this war and follow the fortunes of the army as to try to get to heaven fighting in the cause he considered as holy as prayer."
Northern ministers didn't corner the market on sermons evoking God's help in the fight. But to the victors go the spoils, including the formulation of the storyline in the telling of history.
It's seems funny, doesn't it, that those in a war who proclaim 'God is on my side' tends to produce some of the most vicious, un-God like conduct. Seems like God is called on to do some of the most un-Christian like acts during those type of conflicts.
God even justified slavery, rape, murder, genocide, death and destruction, to hear some say. Wiping out whole families, even children fresh from the cradle can be called 'God's will' at times.
It seems to me, personally, the more someone uses God's name and his 'will' as justification to commit the most hellish acts, really has left God completely out of his acts, his reasons, and his soul.
In the end, that someone will have only himself to face for his acts and reasons for the destruction and pain he has caused. And maybe then he or they will find out what God intended all along.
Sincerely,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
Abraham Lincoln
After the Union army was defeated at the Battle of Bull Run, President Abraham Lincoln declared a National Day of Prayer and Fasting:
It is fit and becoming in all people, at all times, to acknowledge and revere the Supreme Government of God; to bow in humble submission to His chastisement; to confess and deplore their sins and transgressions in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and to pray, with all fervency and contrition, for the pardon of their past offenses, and for a blessing upon their present and prospective action.
And whereas when our own beloved country, once, by the blessings of God, united, prosperous and happy, is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation, and in sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals, to humble ourselves before Him and to pray for His mercy...that the inestimable boon of civil and religious liberty, earned under His guidance and blessing by the labors and sufferings of our fathers, may be restored.
After losing the Second Battle of Bull Run, Lincoln wrote his famous Meditation on the Divine Will:
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.
I am almost ready to say this is probably true -- that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
President Lincoln is quoted making this statement to Eliza Gurney on October 6, 1862:
If I had my way, this war would never have been commenced. If I had been allowed my way, this war would have ended before this. But we find it still continues; and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of His own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our limited understanding we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe, that He who made the world still governs it.
We are indeed going through a great trial -- a fiery trial. In the very responsible position in which I happened to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out His great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to His will, and that it might be so, I have sought His aid.
Near the end of 1862, Lincoln made this tremendous statement to Reverend Byron Sunderland:
The ways of God are mysterious and profound beyond all comprehension -- 'Who by searching can find Him out?' God only knows the issue of this business. He has destroyed nations from the map of history for their sins. Nevertheless, my hopes prevail generally above my fears for our Republic. The times are dark, the spirits of ruin are abroad in all their power, and the mercy of God alone can save us.
Here is the text of Lincoln's Proclamation Appointing a National Fast Day, issued March 30, 1863:
Whereas, the Senate of the United States devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation:
And whereas, it is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history: that those nations only are blessed whose God is Lord:
And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisement in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.
But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious Hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.
Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!
It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
Now, therefore, in compliance with the request and fully concurring in the view of the Senate, I do, by this proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer.
And I do hereby request all the people to abstain on that day from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.
All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the nation will be hard on high and answered with blessing no less than the pardon of our national sins and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. By the President: Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln remained steadfast in his faith even when General Robert E. Lee led his army of 76,000 men into Pennsylvania. He explained to a general wounded at Gettysburg:
When everyone seemed panic-stricken...I went to my room...and got down on my knees before Almighty God and prayed...Soon a sweet comfort crept into my soul that God Almighty had taken the whole business into His own hands...
On November 19, 1863, Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address. The entire speech is only 267 words and is engraved on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In it, he talks about America as a nation under God:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
During the war, Lincoln overheard someone remark that he hoped "the Lord was on the Union's side." Lincoln responded with this sharp rebuke:
I am not at all concerned about that, for I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side.
On September 5, 1864, the Committee of Colored People from Baltimore presented Lincoln with a Bible. Here's what Lincoln told them in his speech:
In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, I believe the Bible is the best gift God has given to man. All the good Savior gave to the world was communicated through this Book. But for this Book we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it. To you I return my most sincere thanks for the elegant copy of the great Book of God which you present.
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