Upon the Altar of the Nation by Harry S. Stout

Author:Harry S. Stout
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

In contrast to most moral commentators who saw in war a bracing moral tonic uplifting the soldiers and citizenry, Baltimore’s border-state pastor N. H. Schenck saw this war bringing out the worst in American society. The voice is rare, but needs to be heard as an evidence of what might have been said. In a near perfect reversal of the vast majority of moral commentary in the North and South, Schenck concentrated on just war conduct and resolutely ignored patriotism—and emancipation. The war, he observed, represented a great “unmasking” of base motives and the “masquerade” of virtue on both contending sides. Nations did not deserve to be worshipped, and war did not produce martyrdom, only slaughter and immorality: “When victories mean nothing but wholesale slaughter and no great or permanent advantage secured, the victory mainly ascertained by measurement of blood and calculation of corpses, I fail to see in it the occasion of thanksgiving to God.”

Far from perceiving a cause for thanksgiving, Schenck witnessed a “tragical era”—human life itself devalued in the mindless pursuit of war. But in the grip of patriotism, he declared, the truth became almost impossible to glimpse:The ranks thinned to-day are filled to-morrow and the mournful dead march is directly changed into the gleeful quickstep. And as we grow indifferent to the value of life, we become proportionately indifferent to those great moral interests attached to life.... It is very difficult for us fairly to realize that we are making for history the bloodiest record which has ever crimsoned its scroll. It is very difficult for us to appreciate the fact that we have suddenly become not only a military, but a warlike people. But difficult as it is, the mind must open for the entrance, and widen for the embrace of these tragical ideas.19

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