A discourse delivered on the Sunday after the disaster of Bull Run, in the North Church, Hartford

REVERSES NEEDED

DISCOURSE

DELIVERED ON THE

mhi after % Jisasffr of §ttll Slim,

IN THE

NORTH CHURCH, HARTFORD.

BY

HORACE BUSHNELL.

HARTFORD :

E. E. HUNT.

1861.

REVERSES NEEDED

A

DISCOURSE

DELIVERED ON THE

■ttiikg after ijre Disaster of §ttll JUtn,

IN THE

NORTH CHURCH, HARTFORD.

BY

HORACE BUSHNELI

HARTFORD :

JL,, E. HUNT.

1861.

Hartford, August 2d, 1861.
Rev. Dr. Bushnell,

Dear Sir:

Believing that your Sermon, preached in the North
Church last Lord's day morning, should be more widely considered, we
respectfully ask of you a copy for publication.

And are yours most respectfully,

JOHN L. BUNCE,
CHARLES HOSMER,
H. K. W. WELCH,
C. N. SHIPMAN,
HENRY C. ROBINSON.

Hartford, August 5th, 1861.
Messrs. J. L. Bunce, Charles Hosmer, H. K. W. Welch, C. N.
Shipman, Henry C. Robinson,

Gentlemen :

The Discourse referred to in your
note is readily submitted to the use of the public.

Most respectfully yours,

HORACE BUSHNELL.

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2011 with funding from

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http://www.archive.org/details/discoursedeliverOObush

REVERSES NEEDED.

PROVERBS 24: 10.

IP THOU FAINT IN THE DAT OF ADVERSITY, THT STRENGTH IS SMALL.

Adversity kills only where there is weakness to be killed.
Real vigor is at once tested and fed by it ; seen to be great as
the adversity mastered is great, and also to be made great
by the mastering. This, too, is the common feeling of man-
kind, for thus only comes it to be a proverb or current
maxim. And the proverb holds good of all sorts of strength,
that of the muscles and that of the nerves, that which lies
in resolution and that which comes by faith in God, that
which is moral and that which is religious, that which is
personal and that which is national, that which belongs to
civil administration and that which pertains to the deeds of
arms. Small is the strength, anywhere and everywhere,
that can not stand adversity, and small will it stay, and
smaller will it grow, to the end.

The last Sabbath morning, when you were assembled
here in the sacred quiet of worship, the patriot soldiers of
your army, that to which you had contributed your sons,
your fellow citizens, and your money ; that whose prepara-
tions and advances you had watched with exulting confidence
and with expectation eager as the love you bore to your dear
country itself, were being joined in battle with its enemies ;

6

thus to have their terrible worship in the day-long sacrifice
of blood, before the belching cannon of the foe, and among
their charging hosts of cavalry, on a field that was itself
their enemy. If it was unnecessary, it is much to be regret-
ted that the battle should have been given upon that day ;
but if it was necessary, then I know not any cause more
worthy of the day, or any offering that could be deeper in
sacrifice, or, in fact, more dutiful to God. The tidings of
the evening came, and it was so far victory. Many were
exultant, but some of us lay down that night oppressed with
dreadful forebodings. In the news of the morning it was
defeat and flight and carnage and loss. Our fine army was
gone, our hopes were dashed, our hearts sunk down strug-
gling as it were in an agony, and our fancy broke loose in
the imagination of innumerable perils. We imagined the
enemy rushing back on Harper's Ferry and across into
Maryland, or down upon the Potomac to cut off the passage
of the river, then upon the great fortress of the Chesapeake,
to drive in that portion of the army and beleaguer the for-
tress. We imagined also a political reaction, a difficulty of
obtaining recruits, a loss of credit and means for the war in
the money market, the probable interference with our block-
ade by France and England, and finally a general outbreak
of factiousness and disorder, amounting to a disorganization
of the government. At any rate the struggle must be
indefinitely protracted, and the public burdens and distresses
indefinitely increased.

These first apprehensions are already quieted, in part.
The loss turns out to be less than was feared, the retreat to
be less completely a flight. The enemy are quite as much
crippled as we. And what is more, a great deal, to our
feeling and our future energy, we have the grand satisfaction
of knowing that our soldiers fought the day out in prodigies

of valor almost unexampled. Defeat is on us, therefore,
but not dishonor; nothing has occurred to weaken us, but
examples have been set to inspire us rather in all the future
struggle. Let us thank God for this and count it the full

half of a victory. Let us also thank God for what is already
made clear, that our spirit as a people is not quelled, but

that we find ourselves beginning, at once, to meet our
adversity with a steady and stout resolve, pushing forward
new regiments and preparing to double the army already
raised. The flash feeling is over, the nonsense bubble of
proud expectation is burst, but the fire of duty burns only
the more intensely, and the determination of sacrifice is as
much more firmly set as it is more rationally made. The
government also is more instructed than it could be without
this disaster, and is bracing itself to its work with tenfold
energy. The army also has a new leader, in whose conduct
we may rest with more implicit confidence. So that in the
future, our chances of defeat are really many times fewer
than they were, or even could have been before, when it
seemed to be so very certain that we could not fail. Our
adversity, since we began to bear it, is already increasing our
strength.

What is now to be done it is not for me to show ; that be-
longs to the Government. I will only say that some things
are to be done by us, that belong to our duty as good citi-
zens. We are not, as good citizens for example, to busy our-
selves overmuch in finding who is to blame, and scolding one
party or another in the administration of the government,
or the army. Nothing will more fatally break down our
confidence, or chill our enthusiasm. One thing at least is
clear, that the government must govern. And if some mis-
takes have been made, in what great cause have they not?
There may be some incompetent persons in the government

8

and the officering of the army, but infallible competency —
where has it been found ? Besides the mistakes have been
discovered and the incompetent men are in a way to be
weeded out of their places. We want no more a driving
force outside of the government, to press it forward when it
is not ready; no more a guiding force to thrust external
judgments in upon its plans. To speak more plainly still,
we want no newspaper government, and least of all a news-
paper army. A pasteboard' government, or pasteboard army,
were just as much better as it is less noisy and less capable
of mischief. Let the government govern, and the army
fight, and let both have their own counsel, disturbed and
thrown out of balance by no gusty conceit, or irresponsible
and fanatical clamor.

But the main point for us now is to get ourselves ready
for the grand struggle we are in, by duly conceiving the
meaning of it, and receiving those settled convictions that
will stay by us in all the changing moods we are to pass, and
the discouragements we are to encounter. This immense
enthusiasm, bursting forth spontaneous, in a day, and fusing
us into a complete unity — how great and thrilling a surprise
has it been to us ! I know of nothing in the whole compass
of human history at all comparable to it in sublimity. It
verily seems to be, in some sense, an inspiration of God; and
it is even difficult to shut away the suggestion that innumer-
able sacrifices and prayers laid up for us by the patriot fath-
ers of the past ages, were being mixed in now with our feel-
ing, and, by God's will, heaving now in our bosom. See,
we have been saying, what an immense loyalty there is in
our people ! how the simple sight of our flag kindles a fire in
us that was never kindled by any grandest impersonation of
heroism and historic royalty ! It is even so, and we thank
God for the revelation ; but this loyalty is no fixed fact, it

9

becomes us to know, as long as it only fires our passion. It
must get hold of our solid convictions, and burn itself
through into our moral nature itself, in order to become
reliable and sure. It must be struck in by sacrifice, drilled
into the very bone of our substance, by persistent struggles
"with adversity, and then it will stand, then it is loyalty com-
plete. To sail out gaily in a breeze, singing patriotic songs,
is a good enough beginning of the voyage, but a hurricane
or two, or only a bad leak discovered, will take all that away,
and then a good steerage at the helm, and a true compass,
and a sturdy, stout resolve, kept up through long watchings
and exhaustive labors — that only will at last bring in the ship.
What I wish then more especially, on the present occasion,
is, to speak, not to impulse, but to conviction, not to cry
"forward," "forward to Richmond" or forward to some
other where beyond — Key West, or Magellan, — but to go
over a calm revision of the matter of the war itself, showing
what it means and the great moral and religious ideas that
are struggling to the birth in it — possible to be duly born
only in great throes of adversity and sacrifice.

It is a remarkable, but very serious fact, not sufficiently
noted, as far as my observation extends, that our grand revo-
lutionary fathers left us the legacy of this war, in the ambi-
guities of thought and principle which they suffered, in
respect to the foundations of government itself. The real fact
is that, without proposing it, or being distinctly conscious of
it, they organized a government, such as we, at least, have
understood to be without moral or religious ideas ; in one
view a merely man-made compact, that without something
farther, which in fact was omitted or philosophically exclu-
ded, could never have more than a semblance of authority.

More it has actually had, because our nature itself has been

2

16

wiser, and deeper, and closer to God, than our political doc-
trines ; but we have been gradually wearing our nature down
to the level of our doctrines ; breeding out, so to speak, the
sentiments in it that took hold of authority, till at last, we
have brought ourselves down as closely as may be, to the
dissolution of all nationality and all ties of order. Hence
the war. It has come just as soon as we made it necessary,
and not a day sooner. And it will stay on to the end of our
history itself, unless the mistake we have suffered is, at least,
practically rectified. We have never been a properly loyal
people ; we are not so now, save in the mere feeling, or flame
of the hour. Our habit has been too much a habit of disre-
spect, not to persons only, but to law. Government, we say,
or have been saying, is only what we make ourselves, there-
fore we are at least upon a level with it ; we too, made the
nationality, and can we not as well unmake it?

That we may duly understand this matter, go back a
moment to the Revolution, and trace the two very distinct,
yet, in a certain superficial sense, agreeing elements, that
entered into it. First, there was what, for distinction's
sake, we may call the historic element, represented, more
especially, by the New England people. The political ideas
were shaped by religion — so far church ideas. The church,
for example, was a brotherhood ; out of that grew historic-
ally the notions of political equality in the state. Govern-
ment also was conceived to be for the governed, just as the
church was for the members ; and both were God's insti-
tutes—ordinances of God. The major vote in both, was
only the way of designating rulers, not the source of their
sovereignty or spring of their authority. Designated by us,
their investiture was from God, the only spring of authority.
Their text for elective government was the same that our
Hartford Hooker used, when preaching, in 1638, for the

11

Convention which framed our Constitution — the first consti-
tution of the new world, and type of all the others that
came after, even that of the nation itself — " Take you wise
men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and
I will make them rulers over you." God was to be the head
of authority, and the rulers were to have their authority
from Him. Such was the historic training that preceded
and prepared this wing of the revolution.

The other wing was prepared by sentiments wholly differ-
ent ; such, for example, as are sufficiently well represented
in the life and immense public influence of Mr. Jefferson ; a
man who taught abstractively, not religiously, and led the
unreligious mind of the time by his abstractions. It was
not his way to deal in moral ideas of any kind. Familiar
with the writings of Rousseau and the generally infidel lit-
erature of the French nation, his mind was, to say the least,
so far dominated by them, as to work entirely in their molds.
He had no conception of any difficulty in making a com-
plete government for the political state by mere human
composition ; following Rousseau's theory, which discovers
the foundation of all government in a "social compact."
Going never higher than man, or back of man, he supposed
that man could somehow create authority over man ; that a
machine could be got up by the consent of the governed
that would really oblige, or bind their consent ; not staying
even to observe that the moment any thing binds, or takes
hold of the moral nature, it rules by force of a moral idea,
and touches, by the supposition, some throne of order and
law above the range of mere humanity. Covered in by this
immense oversight, he falls back on the philosophic, abstract-
ive contemplation of men, and finding them all so many
original monads with nothing historic in them as yet, he
says, are they not all equal ? Taking the men thus to be

12

inherently equal in their natural prerogatives and rights, he
asks their consent, makes the compaot, and that is to be the
grand political liberty of the world.

But the two great wings thus described can agree, you
will see, in many things, only saying them always in a dif-
ferent sense ; one in a historic, the other in an abstractive,
theoretic sense ; one in a religious, and the other in an
atheistic ; both looking after consent and the major vote,
both going for equality, both wanting Articles of Agreement,
and finally both a Constitution. And the result is, that in
the consent, in the major vote, in the equality, in the Arti-
cles of Agreement, in the Constitution, Christianity, in its
solid and historic verity, as embodied in the life of a people,
joins hands, so to speak, with what have been called, though
in a different view, the "glittering generalities" of Mr. Jef-
ferson. Thus in drawing the Declaration of Independence,
he puts in, by courtesy, the recognition of a Creator and
creation, following on with his " self-evident truths," such as
that "all men are created equal," and that "governments
derive their just powers from the consent of the governed ; "
in which, too, the other wing of the revolution can well
enough agree, only they will take them, not as abstractions,
but in a sense that is qualified and shaped by their history.
They had nothing to do with some theoretic equality in man
before government, in which, as a first truth of nature, gov-
ernments are grounded. They were born into government,
and they even believed in a certain sacred equality under it,
as their personal right. They had also elected their rulers,
and so far they could agree to the right of a government by
consent, but they never had assumed that men are ipso facto
exempt from obligation who have not consented, or that an
autocratic and princely government is of necessity void and
without "just power," Their "equality," their "consent,"

13

were the divine right of their history, from the landing of
the fathers downward, and before the French encyclopedists
were born.

You will thus perceive that two distinct, or widely differ-
ent constitutional elements entered into our political order
at the beginning; that, agreeing in forms of words, they
were yet about as really not in agreement, and have, in fact,
been struggling in the womb of it, like Jacob and Esau, from
the first day until now.

We have not always been conscious of the fact, yet so it
has been. On one side, we have had the sense of a historic,
and morally binding authority, freedom sanctified by law
and law by G-od himself, living, as it were, in a common, all-
dominating nationality ; fortified and crowned by moral ideas.
On the other, we have not so much been obeying as specu-
lating, drawing out our theories from points back of all
history — theories of compacts, consentings, reserved rights,
sovereignties of the people and the like — till finally we have
speculated almost every thing away, and find that actually
nothing is left us, but to fight out the question whether we
shall have a nationality or not ; whether we shall go to
pieces in the godless platitudes, or stand fast and live under
laws and institutions sanctified by a Providential history.
Proximately our whole difficulty is an issue forced by slavery ;
but if we go back to the deepest root of the trouble, we shall
find that it comes of trying to maintain a government without
moral ideas, and concentrate a loyal feeling around institu-
tions that, as many reason, are only human compacts, en-
titled of course, if that be all, to no feeling of authority, or
even of respect.

I have spoken thus of Mr. Jefferson and of his opinions,
not as invoking tlie old party prejudice against him, long ago
buried ; I join no issue with his reputed infidelity ; I only

14

charge that he brought in modes of thought and philosophy,
as regards political matters, that we are none the less bitterly
pernicious that they were patriotically meant, and gained a
currency for them that has made them even identical, as
thousands really conceive, with our institutions themselves.

Glance along down the track of our history, now, and see
how they have been letting us regularly down towards the
present disruption of order ; how the moral ideas that con-
stitute the only real basis of government — of ours as of all
others — are ignored, omitted, or quite frittered away by their
action.

Our statesmen, or politicians, not being generally religious
men, take up with difficulty conceptions of government, or
the foundations of government, that suppose the higher rule
of God. They are not atheists, but such modes of thought
are not in their plane. When they hear it affirmed that
" the powers that be are ordained of God," they think it
may be very good in the New Testament and the ministers
and pious people to compliment their religion by such a
tribute, but their scripture notion appears to be forced and
far fetched. It signifies nothing in the way of qualifying
such an impression, that every human soul is configured to
civil, as to parental, authority, bowing to any government
actually existing, autocratic, or elective, with a felt obliga-
tion, when it rules well. As little does it signify that God,
as certainly as there is a God, dominates in all history, build-
ing all societies into forms of order and law, and that, when
constitutions are framed by men, they were as really framed
by God, the Grand Universal Protector of society, and are
nothing, in fact, but the issuing into form of a government
that He before implanted in the social orders and historic ideas
of the people ; possible therefore to be framed and to hold

15

the binding force of laws, because God Himself has prepared
them, and stamped them with his own providential sover-
eignty. Sometimes too, the politicians are a little annoyed,
as we may see, by this foisting in of the claims of religion.
What has religion to do with political matters ? What has
the church to do with the state ? As if the state were really
outside of God's prerogative and he had nothing to do with
it ! — nothing to do with the marshalling and well ordering
and protecting rule of society !

So they fall off easily into the " glittering generalities,"
and begin to theorize about compacts, consentings, and the
like, building up our governmental order from below. First
of all they clear the ground by a sweeping denial ; rejoicing
in the discovery that all claims of divine right in government
are preposterous. If they only meant by this that all claims
to govern wrong by divine right are a baseless and dreadful
hypocrisy, it would be well ; but they really conceive that
government is now to rule without any divine right at all ; as
if there were any such thing as a right that is not divine
right, and has not God's eternal sanctions going with it ; any
such thing as authority in law that is not centered in God,
and pronounced in the moral nature by Him.

They do not perceive that God is joined to all right, and
all defences of right in society, by the eternal necessity of
his nature — stands by them, makes them his own, clothes
them with His own everlasting authority ; hence that all law
gets the binding force of law.

But the ground is clear — religion is one thing, government
is another — and now there is nothing to do but to find how
man can make, or does make a government without God, or
any divine sanction. Well, man is the fact given, govern-
ment the problem. And the man being a complete individual,
independent and sole arbiter of his own actions, and exactly

16

equal, so far at least, to every other, he may choose, if he
please, never to have any government at all. But he con-
sents, and there government begins. He surrenders a part of
his own rights, and what he surrenders goes to make the
government. The government is, of course, a compact. The
major vote chooses the rulers, and the people are the sover-
eign head whence all law and authority emanate. To them
only the rulers are responsible, being in fact their agents,
administering a trust for them. And this, it is conceived, is a
true account of civil government — our own constitutional
government.

These now are the saws of our current political philosophy,
figuring always in the speeches and political speculations of
our statesmen, from the Revolution downward. They could
many of them be true enough were they qualified so as to let
in God and religion, or so as to meet and duly recognize the
moral ideas of history ; but, taken as they are meant, they are
about the shallowest, chafiiest fictions ever accepted by a
people, as the just account of their laws.

Let there be no misunderstanding here ; I am not com-
plaining of the laws or the constitutions ; better and more
beneficent never existed. I am only complaining of the ac-
count that is made of them, the philosophy that is given of
their grounds and underlying principles. They represent, in
fact, our history, moral and religious ; never in any sense the
false reasons, by which we strip them of their sanctity.

There was never, in the first place, any such prior man, or
body of men, to make a government. We are born into gov-
ernment as we are into the atmosphere, and when we assume
to make a government or constitution, we only draw out one
that was providentially in us before. We could not have a
king, or a nobility, for example, in this country ; for there
was no material given out of which to make either one or the

IT

other. The church life and order was democratic too. The
whole English constitution also, was in us before. In these
facts, prepared in history by God, our institutions lie. We
did not make them. We only sketched them, and God put
them in us to be sketched. And when that is done they are
His, clothed with His divine sanction as the Founder and
Protector of States.

Again, neither we nor any other people ever made a civil
compact, except as it was virtually made by God before ; never
surrendered a part of our natural self government to endow
the government of the State. We never had, in fact, any
one right of a government to surrender. What human being
ever had, or by any conceivable method could have, as being
simply a man, the right to legislate, or to punish, or to make
war, or to levy taxes, or to enforce contracts and the payment
of debts, or to summon witnesses ? On the contrary we go
into the civil state for nothing but to get our rights, and have
them secured — all the rights we have.

So of what is called the inherent, natural right of self-
government in a state, and the right of a government by the
major vote. Is it so that no great people of the world ever
had a lawful, or legitimate right to rule but our own ? And
how constantly, when we say it, does the sense of some pre-
posterous assumption creep over the mind of every ordinarily
sensible man, raising the suspicion that after all, the institu-
tions of his country are hollow and baseless— even as the
theory given to account for them, is plainly seen to be.

So again of the popular sovereignty, the natural sover-
eignty of the people. If we understand ourselves, the
people are no more sovereign, and have no better right to
be, than any single ruler has, when ruling in the succession
of birth, if he only takes his power in the true historic way

of his country and rules well. The real truth is, after all,
3

IS

that our popular vote, or choice, is only one way of desig-
nating rulers, and the succession of blood another ; both
equally good and right when the historic order makes them
so. And then the laws, legitimated by history, and clothed
in that manner with a divine right, rule over all — over the
elections, over the successions ; then over the rulers as truly
as the subjects.

Meantime, what results but that we get a government,
under these fictions of theory, which, by the supposition, is
no government. It is only a copartnership, and has no na-
tional authority, no obligation. How can a copartnership
amount to a governing power over the parties in it ? If they
agree to legislate it does not make them a legislature. What
are their rulers, but committees, or agents, and what can
they do that amounts to government, more than the com-
mittees, agents, directors of a bank ? Their " be it enacted,"
has no force of law, it is only their agreement, or consent,
which binds nobody, touches no conscience. They get no
authority till we see them authorized to legislate by God.
Nothing touches the conscience and becomes morally binding
that is not from above the mere human level. Laws become
laws only when there is felt to be some divine right in them,
some voice of God speaking in them.

Now in all these schemings of theory, by which we have
been contriving how to generate, or how we have generated,
a government without going above humanity, we lose out
all moral ideas, and take away all tonic forces necessary to
government. Our merely terrene, almost subterranean,
always godless fabric, becomes more and more exactly what
we have taken it to be in our philosophy. The habit of re-
spect dies out in us, we respect nothing; authority is more
and more completely ignored. What authority have laws
when there is no sovereignty back of them, or in them, but

19

that of the people ? The grand, historic, religions element
is worn away, or supplanted thus, by what we take to be our
wiser philosophy, and the spirit of loyalty runs down to be a
mere feeling of attachment, so weak that we are scarcely
conscious of it, to our mere compacts and man-made sover-
eignties.

Meantime our descent is accelerated in the same direction,
by the demoralizing forces of peace, and unexampled pros-
perity, and more than all, by the scrambles of party and the
venal intrigues of political leaders and rulers, till finally we
reach a state where the government is chiefly valued for what
can be gotten out of it, by the farming of its revenues, and
offices, and contracts. Reverence to its honor, care for its
safety, integrity in maintaining it, willingness to make sacri-
fices for it, all give way and an awful recklessness respecting
it, or what becomes of it, is visible on every side.

And again the same descent is accelerated by the essen-
tially immoral, or unmoral, habit of slavery ; breeding, as it
does, an imperious, violent, unsubordinated character in the
minds that are trained in it. They do not live in law, make
nothing of obligation, or duty, but they grow up into their
will, into self-assertion, into force and bloody passion, and all
the murderous barbarities, misnamed chivalry. To be a man
is to be above obedience, and to speak of duty, conscience,
obedience to God, is the same thing, whether in young or
old, as to be a poltroon, or a sneak. And this wild, self-
willed habit grows worse and worse by continuance ; being
gradually bred into the stock, as all habits are, and becoming
a naturally propagated quality ; till finally a people is pro-
duced, or will be, that are really incapable of law, or sound
government — unfit to be rulers, incapable of being ruled.

But the grand crowning mischief is yet to be named. Out
of these baseless, unhistoric, merely speculated theories of

20

the government, and the gradual demoralization of our
habit under them, a doctrine of state rights is finally to
emerge and organize the armed treason that explodes our
nationality. Our political theories never gave us a real
nationality, but only a copartnership, and the armed treason
is only the consummated result of our speculations. Where
nothing exists but a consent, what can be needed to end it
but a dissent ? And if the states are formed by the consent
of individuals, was not the general government formed by
consent of the states ? What then have we to do but to give
up the partnership of the states when we will ? If a tariff
act is passed, displeasing to some states, they may rightfully
nullify it ; if a president is elected not in the interest of
slavery they may secede ; that is, withdraw their consent,
and stand upon their reserved rights. "By nature," says
Mr. Calhoun, so runs the argument, "every individual has
the right to govern himself, and governments must derive
their right from the assent, express or implied, of the gov-
erned, and subject to such limitations as they may impose."

" Indeed, according to our theory, gov-
ernments are, in their nature, but trusts, and those appointed
to administer them, trustees, or agents, to execute trust
powers. The sovereignty resides elsewhere, in the people,
not in the government, and with us the people mean the
people of the several states." Then of course it follows in
the exact strain, as any one may see, of our philosophy, or
cant misnamed philosophy, that the states have a right to
nullify, or secede at will. And so our brave abstractions that
we begun with, come to their issue finally in a most brave
conclusion that is everyway worthy of them. No matter
that the Constitution asserts in a hundred ways the essential
and perpetual supremacy of the government. No matter
that it was given to the states to be ratified, in that way to

21

cut off eternally all pretences of sovereignty in themselves ;
no matter that more than a full half of the states now exist-
ing were actually created and organized by the general
government on its own territory. Neither is it any thing
that we are landed in the very strange predicament of being
a people, the only one ever heard of in the world, without a
nationality. Is the nationality in the states? No, that was
never so much as thought of. Is it in the general govern-
ment ? No, that is philosophically denied. And so we are
left to the luckless condition of being no nation at all, and
having no nationality anywhere ! We began with a godless
theorizing, and we end, just as we should, in discovering that
we have not so much as made any nation at all. We
scorned this state rights theory at first, but we have been
bidding many years for the casting vote of the south, and
selling out the nation to pay, and the doctrine, meantime,
has been creeping, worm like and silently, into the north,
till many have began to give in to it, scarcely knowing when
it arrived. Finally the secession, argued for as a right,
begins to be planned for as a fact. Even cabinet ministers
in the government were preparing it more than a year ago,
as is well ascertained, contriving how to break down the
credit of the government, how to empty the armories by a
transfer of arms, how to weaken the defences, how to cor-
rupt the allegiance of the army. And now, at last, the fact
itself is come, the secession is made — hence the war.

If now you have followed me in this exposition, you have
seen how our want of moral ideas, and our commonly
accepted philosophy of government, coupled with other
demoralizing and disintegrating influences in our scheme of
society, both north and south, have been drawing us down
to this from the first. We have come to the final break and
disaster, just as soon as we must, not a day sooner. Gravity

was never surer in the precipitation of a stone, or more
regular in the downward pull and pressure.

And what is it now that is arming to assert and establish
the broken nationality? Not religion certainly — it does not
appear that our people are consciously more given to religion
than they have been — yet, in another view, it is no other
than the old historic religious element in which our nation-
ality has been grounded from the first ; that which has been
smothered and kept under, by the specious fictions we have
contrived, to account for the government without reference
to God, or to moral ideas. Yes, it is this old, implicitly, if
not formally, religious element, that is struggling out again
now, clad all over in arms, to maintain the falling nationality.
It looked on the Sumpter flag, the stars and stripes, shot
through and shot down by traitors, and as it looked, took
fire. What a wonder is it even to ourselves, to see the blaze
that is kindled. We call it loyalty — we did not imagine that
we had it ! What a grand, rich sentiment it is ! See what
strength it has! See how it raises common men into heroes!
See the bloody baptism wherewith it is able to be baptized,
and how it pours the regiments on, down the rivers and over
the mountains, and round the promontories, to hurl their
bodies against the armed treason ! The mere feeling, the
passion, if we so choose to call it — is not the bliss of it worth
even the cost of the war ? What in fact, is more priceless to
a nation than great sentiments ? So we bless ourselves in
the loyalty of the hour, and the more that there certainly is
some latent heat of religion in the blaze of it.

But more is wanted, and God is pressing us on to the
apprehending of that for which we are apprehended. Our
passion must be stiffened and made a fixed sentiment, as it
can be only when it is penetrated and fastened by moral

23

ideas. And this requires adversity. As the dyers use mor-
dants to set in their colors, so adversity is the mordant for
all sentiments of morality. The true loyalty is never
reached, till the laws and the nation are made to appear
sacred, or somewhat more than human. And that will not
be done till we have made long, weary, terrible sacrifices for
it. Without shedding of blood there is no such grace pre-
pared. There must be reverses and losses, and times of
deep concern. There must be tears in the houses, as well
as blood in the fields ; the fathers and mothers, the wives
and dear children, coming into the woe, to fight in hard
bewailings. Desolated fields, prostrations of trade, discour-
agements of all kinds, must be accepted with unfaltering,
unsubduable patience. Religion must send up her cry out
of houses, temples, closets, where faith groans heavily before
God. In these and all such terrible throes, the true loyalty
is born. Then the nation emerges, at last, a true nation,
consecrated and made great in our eyes by the sacrifices it
has cost ! There is no way ever but just this to make a
nation great and holy in the feeling of its people. And it
is never raised, in this manner, till it has fought up some
great man, or hero, in whom its struggles and victories are
fitly personated. One really great man or commander we
certainly have, mercifully preserved to us to be the central-
izing head of our confidence, and fulfill his sublime charge
of fatherhood in the conduct of our great affairs. But he
belongs, in a sense, to the past, and will soon be gone. We
want another, that belongs more properly to the future, the
new and great future. And such an one can not be made
to order, or by any brief holiday campaigning. He must be
long enough and deep enough in the struggle to be crowned
as the soldier of Providence. Most deeply do we want such
a man, a new Washington, only still himself a man of his

24

age and time. And if I were a prophet, I would almost
dare to whisper his name. Expectation goes before, expect-
ation prophesies. Calling out her soldier son, with blessings
on his youth, she anoints him beforehand, even as Samuel
anointed David. This, she says, is the man whom the Lord
of Hosts will accept. True, these Washingtons are expen-
sive ; they cost how many sacrifices, how many thousands of
lives, what rivers of tears and blood and money ! And yet
they are cheap ! Our old Washington — what would we take
for him now ? Give us grace, 0 thou God of the land, only
to deserve and patiently wait, and sturdily fight, for another;
so for the establishment of our glorious nationality, and
the everlasting expulsion of those baseless, godless theories
which our fathers let in to corrupt and filch away the prin-
ciples of right and law-begirt liberty for which, in fact, they
bled!

But this is war, we shall be told, and war is certainly no
such moral affair. How then do we expect any such moral
regeneration to come out of it ? In one view the objection
is good ; war is a great demoralizer ; throwing back on
society, men who have been hardened and made desperate,
often, by the vices and reckless violences of camp life. But
the same is true of peace ; that also has its dangers and
corruptions ; breeding, finally, all most selfish, unheroic,
and meanest vices — untoning all noblest energies, making
little men, and loose, and low ; ignorant of sacrifice, and
scarcely meaning it, even when they cleave to their virtues.
Peace will do for angels, but war is God's ordinance for
sinners, and they want the schooling of it often. In a time
of war, what a sense of discipline is forced. Here, at least,
there must be and will be obedience ; and the people, out-
side, get the sense of it about as truly as the army itself.
Here, authority towers high, and the stern necessities of the

25

field clothe it with honor. Government is here sharpened
to a cutting edge. All the laxities of feeling and duty are
drawn tight. Principles and moral convictions are toned to
a practical supremacy. Hence the remarkable fact that the
old Romans were the sternest of all people in their morality.
The military drill of their perpetual warfare brought them
into the sense of order and law, and the fixed necessity of
obedience to rule. And so they became the great law-nation
of the world, producing codes and rescripts that have been
the stock matter of all the civil codes and tribunals even of
the modern nations.

Neither is it any objection that ours is a civil war, how-
ever much we may seem to be horrified by the thought of it.
Where a civil war is not a war of factions, but of principles
and practical ends, it is the very best and most fruitful of all
wars. The great civil war of Cromwell and Charles, for ex-
ample, what was it, in fact, but a fighting out of all that is
most valuable in the British Constitution ? And what was
the result of it, briefly stated, but liberty enthroned and for-
tified by religion ? And there was never a people more for-
tunate in the occasions of a civil war than we. Not one
doubt is permitted us that we are fighting for the right, and
our adversaries for the wrong; we to save the best govern-
ment of the world, and they to destroy it. Whence it fol-
lows that, as God is with all right and for it, by the fixed
necessity of his virtue, we may know that we are fighting up
to God, and not away from Him. And the victory, when it
comes, will even be a kind of religious crowning of our
nationality. All the atheistic jargon we have left behind us
will be gone, and the throne of order, established, will be
sanctified by moral convictions. What we have fought out,
by so many and bloody sacrifices, will be hallowed by them
in our feeling. Our loyalty will be entered into our con-

/

26

science, and the springs of our religious nature. Govern-
ment now will govern, and will be valued because it does,
and the feeble platitudes we let in for a philosophy will be
displaced by the old historic habits and convictions that have
been the real life of our institutions from the first.

All this, you will observe by the simple schooling of our
adversities and without any reform or attempted amend-
ment of our institutions. Just fighting the war out, into
victory and established nationality, will be enough. It
might not be amiss, at some fit time, to insert in the pream-
ble of our Constitution, a recognition of the fact that the
authority of government, in every form, is derivable only
from God ; cutting off, in this manner, the false theories un-
der which we have been so fatally demoralized. But this is
no time to agitate or put on foot political reforms of any
kind ; and I wish it to be distinctly observed, that I am only
showing what our adversity means, and helping you to bear
it with a resolute heart, for the good that is in it.

As to the great and frowning misery of slavery, I know
not what to say, or how the matter may be issued. A pro-
found mystery of God hangs over it thus far, and the veil is
yet to be lifted. We certainly did not undertake this war as
a crusade against slavery. And yet the supporters of slavery
may easily create complications that will turn the whole
struggle down upon it, whether we desire it or not, or even
when we carefully shun the alternative. This one thing we
know, that, in a certain other view, the whole stress now of
the war is against slavery. Simply to be victorious in it,
leaving the constitutional rights of slavery just as they are,
will bring its rampant spirit under, take down its defiant
airs, teach it a compelled respect and modesty, and put a stop
forever to the disgusting and barbarous propagandism of the
past. Then it will be open to conviction, and the laws of

27

population alone, helped by nothing else, will bring it to a
full end in less than fifty years ; the best and most merciful
end, it may be, which the case permits. Thenceforth we are
a homogeneous universally free people, a solid and compact
nation, such as God will have us.

Having such a cause, my friends, with such great hopes
before us, this one almost glorious reverse that we have met
will signify little. Adversity will be our strength, disap-
pointments our arguments. I know not what dark days and
times of unspeakable trial are before us, but we must be
ready for any thing, daunted and discouraged by nothing.
Have we property, let it go — what is property in such a
cause ? Have we husbands, have we sons, put the armor on
them, and the holy panoply of our prayers, and send them
to the field. Any thing, that we may have a nationality, and
a government, and have the true loyalty burnt into the
hearts of our children.

Teach us, 0 God, to be worthy of these great hopes ; make
us equal to the glorious calling of thy Providence ; be thou
God of hosts in our armies; and help us to establish, on
eternal and right foundations, The Great Republic of the
future ages.