History of American Christianity — Chapter XX After the War, Part 1

CHAPTER XX. AFTER THE WAR.

When the five years of rending and tearing had passed, in which slavery was dispossessed of its hold upon the nation, there was much to be done in reconstructing and readjusting the religious institutions of the country.

Throughout the seceding States buildings and endowments for religious uses had suffered in the general waste and destruction of property.

Colleges and seminaries, in many instances, had seen their entire resources swept away through investment in the hopeless promises of the defeated government.

Churches, boards, and like associations were widely disorganized through the vicissitudes of military occupation and the protracted absence or the death of men of experience and capacity.

The effect of the war upon denominational organizations had been various.

There was no sect of all the church the members and ministers of which had not felt the sweep of the currents of popular opinion all about them.

But the course of events in each denomination was in some measure illustrative of the character of its polity.

In the Roman Catholic Church the antagonisms of the conflict were as keenly felt as anywhere.

Archbishop Hughes of New York, who, with Henry Ward Beecher and Bishop McIlvaine of Ohio, accepted a political mission from President Lincoln, was not more distinctly a Union man than Bishop Lynch of Charleston was a secessionist.

But the firm texture of the hierarchical organization, held steadily in place by a central authority outside of the national boundaries, prevented any organic rupture.

The Catholic Church in America was eminently fortunate at one point: the famous bull _Quanta Cura_, with its appended "Syllabus" of damnable errors, in which almost all the essential characteristics of the institutions of the American Republic are anathematized, was fulminated in 1864, when people in the United States had little time to think of ecclesiastical events taking place at such a distance.

If this extraordinary document had been first published in a time of peace, and freely discussed in the newspapers of the time, it could hardly have failed to inflict the most serious embarrassment on the interests of Catholicism in America.

Even now it keeps the Catholic clergy in a constantly explanatory attitude to show that the Syllabus does not really mean what to the ordinary reader it unmistakably seems to mean;

and the work of explanation is made the more necessary and the more difficult by the decree of papal infallibility, which followed the Syllabus after a few years.

Simply on the ground of a _de facto_ political independence, the southern dioceses of the Protestant Episcopal Church, following the principles and precedents of 1789, organized themselves into a "Church in the Confederate States."

One of the southern bishops, Polk, of Louisiana, accepted a commission of major-general in the Confederate army, and relieved his brethren of any disciplinary questions that might have arisen in consequence by dying on the field from a cannon-shot.

With admirable tact and good temper, the "Church in the United States" managed to ignore the existence of any secession; and when the alleged _de facto_ independence ceased, the seceding bishops and their dioceses dropped quietly back into place without leaving a trace of the secession upon the record.

The southern organizations of the Methodists and Baptists were of twenty years' standing at the close of the war in 1865. The war had abolished the original cause of these divisions, but it had substituted others quite as serious.

The exasperations of the war, and the still more acrimonious exasperations of the period of the political reconstruction and of the organization of northern missions at the South, gendered strifes that still delay the reintegration which is so visibly future of both of these divided denominations.

At the beginning of the war one of the most important of the denominations that still retained large northern and southern memberships in the same fellowship was the Old-School Presbyterian Church; and no national sect had made larger concessions to avert a breach of unity.

When the General Assembly met at Philadelphia in May, 1861, amid the intense excitements of the opening war, it was still the hope of the habitual leaders and managers of the Assembly to avert a division by holding back that body from any expression of sentiment on the question on which the minds of Christians were stirred at that time with a profound and most religious fervor.

But the Assembly took the matter out of the hands of its leaders, and by a great majority, in the words of a solemn and temperate resolution drawn by the venerable and conservative Dr. Gardiner Spring, declared its loyalty to the government and constitution of the country.

With expressions of horror at the sacrilege of taking the church into the domain of politics, southern presbyteries one after another renounced the jurisdiction of the General Assembly that could be guilty of so shocking a profanation, and, uniting in a General Assembly of their own, proceeded with great promptitude to make equally emphatic deliverances on the opposite side of the same political question.

[354:1] But nice logical consistency and accurate working within the lines of a church theory were more than could reasonably be expected of a people in so pitiable a plight.

The difference on the subject of the right function of the church continued to be held as the ground for continuing the separation from the General Assembly after the alleged ground in political geography had ceased to be valid; the working motive for it was more obvious in the unfraternal and almost wantonly exasperating course of the national General Assembly during the war; but the best justification for it is to be found in the effective and useful working of the Southern Presbyterian Church.

Considering the impoverishment and desolation of the southern country, the record of useful and self-denying work accomplished by this body, not only at home, but in foreign fields, is, from its beginning, an immensely honorable one.

Another occasion of reconstruction was the strong disposition of the liberated negroes to withdraw themselves from the tutelage of the churches in which they had been held, in the days of slavery, in a lower-caste relation.

The eager entrance of the northern churches upon mission work among the blacks, to which access had long been barred by atrocious laws and by the savage fury of mobs, tended to promote this change.

The multiplication and growth of organized negro denominations is a characteristic of the period after the war.

There is reason to hope that the change may by and by, with the advance of education and moral training among this people, inure to their spiritual advantage.

There is equal reason to fear that at present, in many cases, it works to their serious detriment.

The effect of the war was not exclusively divisive.

In two instances, at least, it had the effect of healing old schisms.

The southern secession from the New-School Presbyterian Church, which had come away in 1858 on the slavery issue, found itself in 1861 side by side with the southern secession from the Old School, and in full agreement with it in morals and politics.

The two bodies were not long in finding that the doctrinal differences which a quarter-century before had seemed so insuperable were, after all, no serious hindrance to their coming together.

Even after the war was over, its healing power was felt, this time at the North.

There was a honeycomb for Samson in the carcass of the monster.

The two great Presbyterian sects at the North had found a common comfort in their relief from the perpetual festering irritation of the slavery question; they had softened toward each other in the glow of a religious patriotism; they had forgotten old antagonisms in common labors; and new issues had obscured the tenuous doctrinal disputes that had agitated the continent in 1837. Both parties grew tired and ashamed of the long and sometimes ill-natured quarrel.

With such a disposition on both sides, terms of agreement could not fail in time to be found.

For substance, the basis of reunion was this: that the New-School church should yield the point of organization, and the Old-School church should yield the point of doctrine; the New-School men should sustain the Old-School boards, and the Old-School men should tolerate the New-School heresies.

The consolidation of the two sects into one powerful organization was consummated at Pittsburg, November 12, 1869, with every demonstration of joy and devout thanksgiving.

One important denomination, the Congregationalists, had had the distinguished advantage, through all these turbulent years, of having no southern membership.

Out of all proportion to its numerical strength was the part which it took in those missions to the neglected populations of the southern country into which the various denominations, both of the South and of the North, entered with generous emulation while yet the war was still waging.

Always leaders in advanced education, they not only, acting through the American Missionary Association, provided for primary and secondary schools for the negroes, but promoted the foundation of institutions of higher, and even of the highest, grade at Hampton, at Atlanta, at Tuskegee, at New Orleans, at Nashville, and at Washington.

Many noble lives have been consecrated to this most Christlike work of lifting up the depressed.

None will grudge a word of exceptional eulogy to the memory of that splendid character, General Samuel C. Armstrong, son of one of the early missionaries to the Sandwich Islands, who poured his inspiring soul into the building up of the "Normal Institute" at Hampton, Va.

, thus not only rearing a visible monument of his labor in the enduring buildings of that great and useful institution, but also establishing his memory, for as long as human gratitude can endure, in the hearts of hundreds of young men and young women, negro and Indian, whose lives are the better and nobler for their having known him as their teacher.

It cannot be justly claimed for the Congregationalists of the present day that they have lost nothing of that corporate unselfishness, seeking no sectarian aggrandizement, but only God's reign and righteousness, which had been the glory of their fathers.

The studious efforts that have been made to cultivate among them a sectarian spirit, as if this were one of the Christian virtues, have not been fruitless.

Nevertheless it may be seen that their work of education at the South has been conducted in no narrow spirit.

The extending of their sect over new territory has been a most trivial and unimportant result of their widespread and efficient work.

A far greater result has been the promotion among the colored people of a better education, a higher standard of morality, and an enlightened piety, through the influence of the graduates of these institutions, not only as pastors and as teachers, but in all sorts of trades and professions and as mothers of families.

This work of the Congregationalists is entitled to mention, not as exceptional, but only as eminent among like enterprises, in which few of the leading sects have failed to be represented.

Extravagant expectations were at first entertained of immediate results in bringing the long-depressed race up to the common plane of civilization.

But it cannot be said that reasonable and intelligent expectations have been disappointed.

Experience has taught much as to the best conduct of such missions.

The gift of a fund of a million dollars by the late John F. Slater, of Norwich, has through wise management conduced to this end.

It has encouraged in the foremost institutions the combination of training to skilled productive labor with education in literature and science.

The inauguration of these systems of religious education at the South was the most conspicuously important of the immediate sequels of the Civil War.

But this time was a time of great expansion of the activities of the church in all directions.

The influx of immigration, temporarily checked by the hard times of 1857 and by the five years of war, came in again in such floods as never before.

[357:1] The foreign immigration is always attended by a westward movement of the already settled population.

The field of home missions became greater and more exacting than ever.

The zeal of the church, educated during the war to higher ideas of self-sacrifice, rose to the occasion.

The average yearly receipts of the various Protestant home missionary societies, which in the decade 1850-59 had been ,000, rose in the next decade to more than ,000,000, in the next to nearly ,000,000, and for the seven years 1881-87 to ,000,000. [358:1] In the perils of abounding wealth by which the church after the war was beset, it was divine fatherly kindness that opened before it new and enlarged facilities of service to the kingdom of heaven among foreign nations.

From the first feeble beginnings of foreign missions from America in India and in the Sandwich Islands, they had been attended by the manifest favor of God.

When the convulsion of the Civil War came on, with prostrations of business houses, and enormous burdens of public obligation, and private beneficence drawn down, as it seemed, to its "bottom dollar" for new calls of patriotism and charity, and especially when the dollar in a man's pocket shrank to a half or a third of its value in the world's currency, it seemed as if the work of foreign missions would have to be turned over to Christians in lands less burdened with accumulated disadvantages.

But here again the grandeur of the burden gave an inspiration of strength to the burden-bearer.

From 1840 to 1849 the average yearly receipts of the various foreign missionary societies of the Protestant churches of the country had been a little more than a half-million.

In the decade 1850-59 they had risen to ,000; for the years of distress, 1860-69, they exceeded ,300,000; for the eleven years 1870-80 the annual receipts in this behalf were ,200,000; and in the seven years 1881-87 they were ,000,000. [359:1] We have seen how, only forty years before the return of peace, in the days of a humble equality in moderate estates, ardent souls exulted together in the inauguration of the era of democracy in beneficence, when every humblest giver might, through association and organization, have part in magnificent enterprises of Christian charity such as had theretofore been possible "only to princes or to men of princely possessions."

[359:2] But with the return of civil peace we began to recognize that among ourselves was growing up a class of "men of princely possessions"--a class such as the American Republic never before had known.

[359:3] Among those whose fortunes were reckoned by many millions or many tens of millions were men of sordid nature, whose wealth, ignobly won, was selfishly hoarded, and to whose names, as to that of the late Jay Gould, there is attached in the mind of the people a distinct note of infamy.

But this was not in general the character of the American millionaire.

There were those of nobler strain who felt a responsibility commensurate with the great power conferred by great riches, and held their wealth as in trust for mankind.

Through the fidelity of men of this sort it has come to pass that the era of great fortunes in America has become conspicuous in the history of the whole world as the era of magnificent donations to benevolent ends.

Within a few months of each other, from the little State of Connecticut, came the fund of a million given by John F. Slater in his lifetime for the benefit of the freedmen, the gift of a like sum for the like purpose from Daniel Hand, and the legacy of a million and a half for foreign missions from Deacon Otis of New London.

Great gifts like these were frequently directed to objects which could not easily have been attained by the painful process of accumulating small donations.

It was a period not only of splendid gifts to existing institutions, but of foundations for new universities, libraries, hospitals, and other institutions of the highest public service, foundations without parallel in human history for large munificence.

To this period belong the beginnings of the Johns Hopkins University and Hospital at Baltimore, the University of Chicago, the Clarke University at Worcester, the Vanderbilt University at Nashville, the Leland Stanford, Jr. , University of California, the Peabody and Enoch Pratt Libraries at Baltimore, the Lenox Library at New York, the great endowed libraries of Chicago, the Drexel Institute at Philadelphia, and the Armour Institute at Chicago.

These are some of the names that most readily occur of foundations due mainly to individual liberality, set down at the risk of omitting others with equal claim for mention.

Not all of these are to be referred to a religious spirit in the founders, but none of them can fail of a Christian influence and result.

They prepare a foothold for such a forward stride of Christian civilization as our continent has never before known.

The sum of these gifts of millions, added to the great aggregates of contribution to the national missionary boards and societies, falls far short of the total contributions expended in cities, towns, and villages for the building of churches and the maintenance of the countless charities that cluster around them.

The era following the war was preëminently a "building era."

Every one knows that religious devotion is only one of the mingled motives that work together in such an enterprise as the building of a church; but, after all deductions, the voluntary gifts of Christian people for Christ's sake in the promotion of such works, when added to the grand totals already referred to, would make an amount that would overtax the ordinary imagination to conceive.

And yet it is not certain that this period of immense gifts of money is really a period of increased liberality in the church from the time, thirty or forty years before, when a millionaire was a rarity to be pointed out on the streets, and the possession of a hundred thousand dollars gave one a place among "The Rich Men of New York."

In 1850 the total wealth of the United States was reported in the census as seven billions of dollars.

In 1870, after twenty years, it had more than fourfolded, rising to thirty billions.

Ten years later, according to the census, it had sixfolded, rising to forty-three billions.

[361:1] From the point of view of One "sitting over against the treasury" it is not likely that any subsequent period has equaled in its gifts that early day when in New England the people "were wont to build a fine church as soon as they had houses for themselves,"[361:2] and when the messengers went from cabin to cabin to gather the gifts of "the college corn."