CIVIL WAR? NOT!
“CIVIL” WAR? NOT !
A sermon by Rev. Robert M. Eddy, Minister Emeritus
Unitarian Universalism Church of Pensacola, FL
Delivered April 4, 2011 at
the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Bay County, FL
READINGS:
BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC
By Julia Ward Howe, as published in January 1862
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah,
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah,
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemnors, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”
Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah,
Since God is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah,
Our God is marching on. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah,
While God is marching on.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succor to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah,
Our God is marching on.
MOTHER’S DAY PROCLAMATION
Julia Ward Howe, published May, 1870.
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm. Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possessions. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace. And each bearing, after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.”
SERMON
“CIVIL” WAR ?
If you really listen to the words of Julia Ward Howe’s poem, Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory Of the Coming of the Lord you’ll see it is a pretty good expression of “Jihad.” Of course in the United States we don’t call it Jihad, we call it “ Crusade.” As did George W. Bush ten years ago when he urged citizens of the U.S. to enter onto “A crusade against Terrorists. He later changed that to “A war against Terrorism.” ???? CHECK THESE QUOTES !
Historically a Crusade was a promise by the Pope to any one who killed a designated enemy of the Church; a promise that the Crusader, would go directly to heaven escaping hell and even purgatory. Crusades were NOT only against Muslims. For example, in the year 1208 the Pope declared a Crusade against a group of heretics called Cathars. It was in that Crusade that the phrase we heard used in Vietnam originated. You remember it. During the Mai Lai incident, Lieutenant Calley was alleged to have said, “Kill them all. God will sort them out.”
Of course it’s not right! Wasn’t right 1208. It wasn’t right in 1865. It wasn’t right in 1965. It isn’t right now. One does not create peace or justice by going to war. When we go to war we have abandoned the path to peace. We begin to sing our “battle Hymn.” So grand is the tune that we ignore the blood thirsty words.
Julia Ward Howe wrote the “Battle Hymn in 1861 but in 1870, Nine years later she issued the proclamation which you heard earlier this morning. When the fog of war lifted, Julia Howe recognized that war was NOT the answer. It was not then. It is not now.
America’s bloodiest war began, so the media tell us on April 12, 1861. By the time it ended at Appomattox court house on April 18,1865 at least 620,000 Americans had been killed! 620,000 – more than died in all other American wars combined!
Where I grew up that war was called the Civil War. Down here it’s often called, The War Between the States or even “The War of Northern Aggression.” What ever you call it, it was America’s bloodiest war and the only war in which
large portions of the American countryside were devastated.
When did it begin? Most would say the Civil war began when the Army of South Carolina, which had only recently declared itself independent, fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.
Others would say it began in November 6, 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was elected President. Others might say on March 4, 1861 when Lincoln was inaugurated.
I prefer the date in 1846, April 25 1846, when the United States invaded Mexico. In two years of one-sided battle, the United States had annexed a third of Mexico’s land. The reason the Polk administration declared war on Mexico, as then congressman Abraham Lincoln pointed, out was to acquire more land on which the way of life based on Slavery could be practiced. Many in the United States opposed that war. Concord naturalist Henry David Thoreau went so far as to refuse to pay his taxes, declaring that the rights of conscience trumped the duty to obey civil law. The famous story of Emerson visiting Thoreau in jail comes from that year. You know the story. Emerson asked, Henry, why are you here? And Thoreau replied, “Waldo, why are you not here?” Thoreau was a war resister. He was not a Pacifist. Later, in 1854, Thoreau justified the insurrection led by John Brown which ended when Brown tried to seize the Federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
By 1846, when the United States declared war on Mexico the division between the North and South had already begun to harden. A large minority of people in the North, they called themselves Abolitionists, wanted slavery abolished in all the states and territories of the U.S. Some were willing to enter on a Crusade to make that dream a reality.
Perhaps the beginning of the war between the North and South can be dated even earlier.
In 1837, nine years before we invaded Mexico, Unitarian John C. Calhoun, then a Senator from South Carolina, wrote :
“They who imagine that the spirit now abroad in the North [he’s talking about the Abolitionists] … They who imagine that the spirit now abroad in the North will die away of itself without a shock or convulsion, have formed a very inadequate conception of its real character; it will continue to rise and spread, unless prompt and efficient measures to stay its progress be adopted. Already it [abolitionism] has taken possession of the pulpit, of the schools, and, to a considerable extent, of the press; those great instruments by which the mind of the rising generation will be formed.
However sound the great body of the non—slaveholding States are at present, in the course of a few years they will be succeeded by those who will have been taught to hate the people and institutions of nearly one-half of this Union, with a hatred more deadly than one hostile nation ever entertained towards another. It is easy to see the end. By the necessary course of events, if left to themselves, we must become, finally, two people. It is impossible under the deadly hatred which must spring up between the two great nations, if the present causes are permitted to operate unchecked, that we should continue under the same political system.”
Calhoun’s 1837 words were prophetic. There were clergymen in the north, only a few of whom were Unitarians, who said, “So Be it; Let us cut ourselves loose from these evil slaveholders. We have a right to succeed from this immoral union of sovereign states.” These early abolitionists saw the division of the Union as better than living under a constitution that permitted slavery. In fact some of those Abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, publicly burned the Constitution calling it ‘a pact with the Devil’. And Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriett Beecher Stowe, who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, sent rifles to John Brown in Kansas saying, “The rifles are a greater moral agency than the Bible.” The weapons were shipped in boxed marked “Bibles” and soon all rifles sent to Free-Soilers were called Beecher’s bibles”
Most citizens in the North, Trinitarians and Unitarians alike, were willing to make compromises over slavery in order to hold the Union together but not Abolitionists. Abolitionists believed that slavery was so evil that Christian soldiers, new Crusaders, should be sent to trample it underfoot.
By March 4, 1861, the day Lincoln took the oath “to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States,” war seemed inevitable: all compromise had failed.
Though not an abolitionist himself, Abraham Lincoln was elected because Abolitionists thought he would, if not abolish slavery, at least end its spread. It was Lincoln’s election in November 1860 that precipitated the secession of South Carolina and six other states. If you doubt it read the preamble to the 1861 constitution of the Sovereign State of South Carolina. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated the possibility of compromise had past.
The countdown to Civil war had been anything but Civil. We’ve heard a lot about incivility of political discourse in 2011 but congressional debates now are love feasts compared to what was happened in the 1850’s and 60’s.
On May 22nd, 1856 Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a leader of Abolitionists in Congress, was attacked by Democratic congressman Preston Smith Brooks from South Carolina. Smith wasn’t satisfied to knock Senator Sumner unconscious with his metal tipped cane. He continued to beat the Senator so severely that he nearly died. When other Senators tried to intervene they were blocked by Representatives Laurence Keitt, who was holding a pistol and shouting “let them be.” Brooks continued to beat Sumner until he broke his cane.” Sumner wasn’t able to return to his Senate Seat for three years.
By 1856 civility had pretty much been abandoned in the conflict over Slavery. Those who supported slavery were willing to dissolve the union in order to preserve it in the Slave States. Those opposed to slavery were willing to compel the Slave states to remain in the Union by force of Arms. Neither side realized the hideous cost, 620,000 military deaths, economic devastation of the South, the widowing of thousands of families, north and south.
Many of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors were involved in the great Crusade to end slavery, before the war, during the war, and in the ten years following Lee’s surrender during which Northern troops sought to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. But in 1876 presidential politics ended the great Crusade. By then Julia Ward Howe who had written the Battle Hymn of the Republic had become a pacifist and wrote her mothers peace day proclamation.
What did the civil war accomplish? tenant farming and “Jim Crow” kept the former slaves and their descendents in a different brand of chains for over a century. What did the war destroy? Was there a better way? Those are the question people ask after every war. We UU’s are asking them today.
In 2009 the General Assembly of Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations tried to draw up a comprehensive statement of “things generally believed among us” in the matter of war. A commission had labored for years to find a middle ground between those who want us to be “a peace church” like the Quakers and the Mennonites and those who believe there are such things as just wars. They point out that we had always supported the” conscientious warrior” as well as the conscientious objector. The proposal put before the General Assembly rejected preemptive wars and wars of “liberation” but left room for wars of “self defense” and wars “in defense of human rights” (I’m citing from memory.) But, once again, as in the 1860’s and the 1960’s we UU’s could not achieve consensus. We decided that on this issue we would have to agree to disagree. I know which side I would have supported. I believe THERE ARE NO JUST WARS. ONCE WAR HAS BEGIN IT’S JUST WAR : HELL ON EARTH WRAPPED IN HIGH SOUNDING RHETORIC ! ! Never was that better demonstrated than in
As we watch the explosion of protests in Arabic speaking countries against autocratic rulers, we UU’s together with other concerned Americans debate whether we – as citizens of the United States – should support the righteous side – that is the more democratic – side and how. Same problem as in the 1860’s. It’s not the whether; it’s the HOW that is the real problem. As it was in the Gulf wars, Vietnam, Korea, WW II, WW I, the Spanish American War, the Civil war . In all these cases, War was proposed as THE answer. IS WAR EVER THE ANSWER? I THINK NOT!
I could pontificate here, pretend I’m Obama or Hillary Clinton but that would be ridiculous. What I am sure of is that we must not now, once more, fall victim to the Crusader mentality. We are now being asked to intervene in a civil war in Libya; it seems our President is asking us to under take a Crusader against Autocracy as an earlier president asked us to undertake a Crusade against terrorism.
There are no “civil” wars. War is the very opposite of civility. War is the very opposite of the “loving kindness” of which Jesus and Buddha and Gandhi and Bishop Tutu and Martin Luther King spoke and exemplified in their lives. There are no just wars; just more or less self serving wars. Each war as it recedes into history reveals more and more of its essential character. Yes, the so called War Between the States was a war of Northern Aggression. And the Mexican war was a war of Southern aggression. The First World War was not the war to end all wars nor was the Second World war a war to make the world safe for democracy .
We are beginning to see now the true roots of the Vietnam War and the other Surrogate Wars against the Soviet Union as in Afghanistan and Angola. And more and more Americans are coming to realize that the first and second Iraq wars had little to do with riding the world of corrupt and brutal dictators or supporters of terrorism.
Why must we wait decades or even centuries to dispel the miasma that glorifies war? How many times must individuals follow the path of Julia War Howe from celebrant of war to promoter of peace? How many times will we be seduced into supporting a war for some allegedly noble cause?
I, for one, do not regret the decision I made at the age of 14 never to participate in any war, no matter how just or noble it’s apparent aims. I only regret that I did not devote more of my energy to the cause of peace.
END
THE OPENING HYMN WAS:
A GLAD RESPLENDANT DAY by Caroline M. Severence
To the Tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic)
Mine eyes have seen the glory of a glad, resplendent day,
When the lords of war shall vanish with their blind and brutal sway,
As the women join in marching with their men on freedom’s way,
And the truth goes marching on !
Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah,
As the truth goes marching on !
The people have awakened and their eyes must close no more,
They will burn the gibbets, sheath the sword and still the drums of war,
They will bring the earth to blossom where the desert was before,
And the truth goes marching on !
Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, glory, hallelujah,
As the truth goes marching on !
(From the British Unitarian Hymnal ©The Hodgin Press, Loss Angeles
Adapted by Waldemar Hills from Caroline M. Severance 1820 – 1914
Caroline M. Severance was a friend of Julia Ward Howe, cofounder with her of the Women’s Clubs of America and a leader in the Woman Suffrage movement in California and a founding member of the Unitarian Church of Los Angeles.
THE CLOSING HYMN WAS:
FORWARD THROUGH THE AGES written by Frederick Lucian Hosmer