"This Great Day of Suffering": Redeeming Memories of the Civil War1

I would like to begin by thanking HSEC President Bob Prichard for inviting me to be this evening's speaker. Since Americans are now in process of commemorating Sesquicentennial, I also appreciate his suggestion that I focus my remarks on religious aspects ofthat conflict, revisiting some sources I first studied while working on my Ph.D. thesis in mid-1980s.2 An article in New York Times recently declared that Civil fever is raging, and I certainly hope I can get some of that fever raging tonight. Moreover, as we gather here at Christ Church Cathedral on Monument Circle in Indianapolis, I trust we will feel inspired by immense martial column towering over us, which celebrates service of Indiana citizens in so-called War for Union.4Luckily for me - if lucky is right word to describe it - today happens to be one hundred and forty-ninth anniversary of George Pickett's legendary Charge at Gettysburg. On afternoon of 3JuIy 1863 approximately 12,500 Confederate soldiers advanced on foot across almost a mile of open ground in a futile attempt to break Union battle-line south of Gettysburg - a bloody defeat, often called the high-water mark of Confederacy, in which over 1,100 southerners were killed outright, at least 4,000 were wounded, and several hundred more were captured. In one well-known photograph of carnage taken on day following Pickett's assault, a cameraman recorded a panoramic view of bodies littering battlefield - a scene that later was labeled, A Harvest of Death.5The poet Walt Whitman, who visited coundess numbers of wounded and dying soldiers at hospital bedsides during die also knew horrible consequences of such batties. The forced Whitman and Americans like him to come to terms with death as never before, dealing not only with loss of hundreds of thousands of young lives in combat, but also with sight of tens of thousands of maimed survivors of fighung. Profoundly moved by what he saw while nursing soldiers in military hospitals, Whitman complained diat American public could not really appreciate history of die war - personal experiences of ordinary men, their feelings about what they had witnessed, and their memories of traumatic events on batdefields and in army camps. For him this was the real war, but he feared it would never be adequately documented in standard chronicles of struggle.Keeping in mind Whitman's insights about importance of war's history, let me recount an incident that, indeed, does not appear in any of official records of military engagement at Gettysburg. In Four Years under Marse Robert, a popular memoir of life in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, former Confederate officer Robert Stiles wrote about a soldier named Allan, who was killed during Pickett's Charge. Allan had been a religious man, and Stiles described how, a few days before his death, he had remarked that war's terrors were actually strengthening his faith. Although Allan eventually died in a gruesome fashion - top of his head was blown off by a bursting artillery shell - Stiles was convinced that his friend's death at Gettysburg had not been tragic, but glorious and triumphant. Sure of his belief in Jesus Christ, Allan had fearlessly entered battle, Stiles wrote, and at instant when cannonball ended his earthly life, he had been carried up into heaven, like Elijah, riding God's chariot and horses of fire.8A similar reflection on interior meaning of bloodletting at Gettysburg comes from pen of Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent Congregationalist minister and brother of even more renowned novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Beecher's novel Norwood describes life in a fictional New England village in middle of nineteenui century. The most critical portion of narrative occurs during War, when various residents of town learn of fate of their sons and brothers serving in Union regiments. …