”In General Trimble’s, and the immediately neighboring brigades, there is in progress, at this hour, one of the most glorious revivals I ever witnessed. The audiences and the interest have grown to glorious dimensions. It would rejoice you over-deeply to glance for once instant on our night-meeting in the wildwoods, under the full moon, aided by the light of our sidestands. You would behold a mass of men seated on the earth all around you...fringed in all its circumference by a line of standing officers and soldiers – two or three deep – all exhibiting the most solemn and respectful earnestness that a Christian assembly ever displayed.”
Very pious.
"Walter Taylor wrote in his diary toward the end of February [1865] that they were "trying to corner this old army, but like a brave lion brought to bay at last it is determined to resist to the death, and if die it must die game." Indeed, the men who remained, and knew there would be no immediate peace, did not give up. "We had early forbidden ourselves to think of any end to the struggle except a successful one," wrote a cavalryman,"and that being an impossibility, we avoided the subject altogether."
The fervid religiosity which swept through the camps at Fredericksburg 'was replaced by a wild, occult mysticism. Omens were found in dried springs and hens' eggs and impending disaster seemed only to strengthen faith in some unnamable thing which would end the suffering. "I think 'hardly any man in that army entertained a thought of coming out of the struggle alive. The only question with each was when his time was to come, 'and a sort of gloomy fatalism took possession of many minds. Believing that they must be killed sooner or later, and that the hour and manner of their deaths were unalterably fixed, many became singularly reckless."
"The Generals" p. 421 by Nancy Scott Anderson and Dwight Anderson.
Walt
Still humming the Battle Hymn, eh? But let it not be said I refused to contribute, when you elected to change the subject to “wild, occult mysticism.” From the same reference quoted previously
“Eventually, racked by grief but energized by the hope held out by the Hydesville Rappings, [Harriet Beecher Stowe] turned to seances, attempting to find beyond the hand of death the renewed life of her stricken son. Her husband had similar yearnings. For many years, Calvin Stowe had communed directly with the dead, testifying that, as a child, ‘every night after I had gone to bed and the candle was removed, a very pleasant-looking human face would peer at me [from near a place on the wall] and gradually press forward his head, neck, shoulders, and finally his whole body as far as the waist, through the opening, and then, smiling upon me with great good-nature, would withdraw in the same manner in which he had entered.’ Harriet followed her husband into this world of visions, though only for a short time...
“[Within a few years] (e)ach of Stowe’s stories was more vivid than the last, and more controversial. In one, a man who refuses food to a runaway slave is called before God, who orders him out of heaven with the words ‘Depart from me ye accursed.’ The story...owes much to her new vision of universal justice – that emancipators are the ‘elect,’ while the slaveholders are damned for all eternity. Implicit in her writings is her belief that acting against slavery is a necessary expiation, a physical sacrifice, that could be exemplified in the shedding of blood. Union soldiers would be blessed in marching off to war against slaveholders, she thought, ever as much as Jesus was in sacrificing himself for sinners...”
I find Ms. Stowe’s views rather reminiscent of those of Islamic terrorists and suicide bombers - her understanding of the Scriptures was apparently no more sound than most ‘unionists’ understanding of the Constitution. Perhaps the woman to whom Abraham Lincoln attributed the start of the war should have remained a (relatively) harmless ‘mystic’...
;>)
For you to disparage the well-documented spread of the Gospel among the Confederate troops is unconscionable and small-hearted.
An evidence that God indeed works in strange ways is that the side that defended something we today find abhorrent no doubt enjoyed the greater revivals during the war.
You don't have to like it; please don't deny the truth, though.
The ultimate paradox of the War is the surrender of the godly Lee to the drunk Grant.