The Great Schism: The Dividing of Virginia during the American Civil War

Charles G. Finney and others in the decades before the Civil War were influential in and in every conflict the responsibility, being divided among many, is not feared. By on society and the great amount of knowledge communicated in the numerous .. it was prophesied by a Virginia delegate, could have devastating.
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In addition, white Virginians found Union victory a disturbing challenge to their belief that God had favored both slavery and the Confederacy. Black Virginians, on the other hand, found Union victory a resounding affirmation that God had heard their prayers. By late in the antebellum period, most white Virginians adhered to an "evangelical" Protestant church, one in which members stressed the importance of being born again and experiencing God directly in worship.

Roughly one-half of black Virginians attended an evangelical Protestant church as well, typically a Baptist one. A persistent minority of Virginians, including roughly 2, Jews, remained outside the evangelical tradition, but—based on the number of accommodations recorded for each denomination in the census—five of six churchgoers in attended an evangelical Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Episcopal church. In some states, Presbyterians and Episcopalians resisted identification as evangelicals, but in Virginia they embraced the label.

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Baptists and Methodists were by far the two largest denominations in the state. Baptists were strongest in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions, while Methodists dominated the trans-Allegheny west and enjoyed some support throughout the state. White and black Virginians within these evangelical denominations, with the exception of Episcopalians, experienced disunion in their churches long before the secession winter of — Presbyterians divided their church into Old and New School factions in over roughly sectional lines.

Most Virginians adhered to the Old School, the branch more accommodating of slavery, even though not all acknowledged slavery as the cause of the rupture.

When Baptists and Methodists divided their respective denominations into Northern and Southern branches between and , they were unequivocal that the main object of contention was slaveholding. Prominent Virginia Methodist William A.

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Smith was one of the most aggressive advocates for slavery in the councils of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He and other white Southern Methodists counseled division when their Northern coreligionists refused to recognize the authority of a slaveholding bishop at the General Conference. Similarly, Virginian Jeremiah Bell Jeter was one of the first Baptists to cry for dissolution of the Baptist Triennial Convention late in , when the American Baptist Home Mission Society declared that it would not hire slaveholding missionaries. The denominational schisms were important for several reasons.

On a most basic level, white Virginians interpreted the divisions as evidence that Northern Christians had strayed from the faith and were pursuing a secular agenda antagonistic to that of believing white Southerners. Members of the Christian Church clearly articulated the fear of Northern heterodoxy in , two years before they also divided over slavery and organized the Southern Christian Convention. They complained that Northerners had "departed from the teachings of the Bible, our only rule of faith and practice, which neither makes the ownership of slave property a test of fellowship, religious character, or church membership.

Some white Virginians came to see separation as a workable alternative to continued debate. Finally, the denominational schisms upset relationships within many Virginia congregations. Methodists in the northern and western portions of the commonwealth battled with one another over whether to align with the Northern or Southern jurisdictions of the church, foreshadowing both the bitter battles between unionists and secessionists during the secession crisis and the fragmentation of the state into eastern and western parts during the war.

The Richmond Christian Advocate recorded hard-fought arguments in Leesburg, Warrenton, and Fredericksburg, for example, in the opening months of These disputes, sometimes called "border wars," never entirely ceased before the Civil War. There was also a new round of divisions during and after the secession crisis, when Lutherans and Episcopalians split for the first time and Methodists and Presbyterians further divided. In sum, many Virginians experienced the Civil War as a religious battle before a single shot was fired.

White Virginia churchmen believed that God ordained slavery, and many regarded white Northern clerics as apostate by the autumn of Most of this group, however, did not translate their support for slavery into support for immediate secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln as U.

Instead, they determined to honor the scriptural command to "be subject unto the higher powers" Romans In this way, white Virginia Protestants closely followed the counsels of white Virginia statesmen, most of whom were conditional Unionists. In January a number of Virginia clergymen published an open letter in the state's denominational newspapers counseling against disunion but warning that "if the Southern States of the Union are persistently refused their full rights in the confederation and its common territories, and the protection granted by the Constitution to their peculiar property," then the U.

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Constitution would be broken and secession therefore morally viable. Ultimately, many white Virginians found in Lincoln's call for troops sufficient evidence that the Constitution was broken.

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Once white Virginians witnessed what they regarded as Lincoln's perfidy, in the words of Virginia Presbyterian minister Richard McIlwaine, "the people of Virginia generally flopped over to the other side, became rabid Secessionists and were ready for a fight. White churchmen of all denominational backgrounds within Confederate Virginia—not just the dominant evangelical Protestants—supported the Southern cause both materially and ideologically, even as black Virginians prayed and worked steadfastly for the defeat of the Confederacy. He recruited chaplains for Catholic soldiers and, when the "Montgomery Guards" of the 1st Virginia Infantry marched to his cathedral, blessed their weapons and their service.

Indeed, Confederate president Jefferson Davis directly encouraged ministers to support the cause by declaring ten different fast days during the course of the war. On these days, he expected Confederate citizens to attend their respective houses of worship and pray for their fledgling nation in comparison, Lincoln declared three such days.

McGuire's comments begin to show the extent to which Virginia's and the Confederacy's leaders succeeded in framing the Civil War as a religious struggle. White churchmen who believed that they were engaged in a holy war sometimes feared that Virginians might not be righteous enough to succeed.

Cobb had become convinced that God was using Northern armies to punish white Southerners for their accumulation of "a vast amount of worldly Good[s]" without rendering sufficient thanks to God. Clerics tried to address this fatalistic turn of white Southern religiosity by arguing that God chastened his chosen people—and that suffering was thereby a sign of white Southerners' special relationship with God, not of their pending defeat. In a widely published sermon in January , Episcopalian Charles Minnigerode preached that "[t]he might and power which our enemies bring against us, are not the might and power of God's spirit, we may be sure—except so far as they are permitted to chasten us for our sins and train us for the hardships of a godly warfare.

Ash has argued that, on an institutional level, the fate of Southern churches during the Civil War depended in large part upon their proximity to the battlefield. In occupied cities and towns where the Union Army was able to provide some measure of security, white clergymen were typically able to keep their churches open during the war as long as they acknowledged the authority of the United States Government. When they refused to do so, however, Union officials were quick to shut down their congregations.

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According to Stewart, "Two sergeants then seized me in the Chancel, and with great violence, holding a revolver at my breast, they forced me out of the Church, and through the streets, with the surplice on, each of them grasping it upon the shoulder so tightly as to leave upon it the marks of their hands. In what Ash termed "no-man's land," territory that changed hands between Union and Confederate armies, churchmen had more difficulty keeping their churches open.

No security, it turned out, was worse than occupation, and this was true for the rural hinterland around occupied towns as much as it was for areas literally between the armies. In these increasingly lawless areas, the women, children, and older men who comprised the bulk of white congregants dared not risk travel to distant churches. The secretary of Ebenezer Baptist Church in northern Virginia revealingly noted after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox that "the Church has not met together for up[w]ards of three years and the cause thereof was the ware in thes United States.

Whites within the reach of the Union Army faced additional ecclesiastical challenges after December 9, On that date, U. Stanton ordered that clerics from the Northern branch of the Methodist Church could occupy "all houses of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in which a loyal minister, who has been appointed by a loyal Bishop of said Church does not officiate. Missionaries from the American Baptist Home Mission Society occupied pulpits in the Tidewater region, prompting delegates to the Portsmouth Baptist Association to resolve when they assembled in November , "That we should be recreant to our sacred duty as guardians of the truth, if we did not, as Baptists, and as an Association, enter out solemn protest against such action as thoroughly unbaptistic and subversive of the doctrine of church independence.

Even in these locations, however, churches faced massive disruptions caused by the absence of white male members and the increasing resistance of black members. African Americans in biracial or white-controlled congregations saw the arrival of Union troops as an opportunity.

History of West Virginia - Wikipedia

They also welcomed the Northern missionaries whom white Virginians despised, usually as teachers but sometimes as spiritual leaders. The AME also enjoyed success at recruiting new churches in Portsmouth, but their good fortune was rare. The overwhelming majority of black Virginia churchgoers were Baptist, and they typically steered clear of Northern organizers, started their own congregations, and accepted from Northern missionaries only scholastic instruction and material assistance. In , the capital shifted to Charleston, but it returned to Wheeling in Voters selected Charleston over Martinsburg and Clarksburg, and the capital finally moved to its permanent home in Western Virginians had attempted to form the state of Westsylvania after the American Revolution.

Sectional differences brewed inside Virginia for decades before the Civil War. The Continental Congress ignored the petition along with another plea in to make Westsylvania the 14th state. In , land speculators attempted to establish a colony called Vandalia on much of the same footprint as Westsylvania.

While city dwellers began to receive free mail delivery in , the same was not true for the majority of Americans who lived in rural areas. Farm families needed to travel to distant post offices to retrieve their mail or hire private companies to deliver. For 30 years, West Virginia was home to a top-secret bunker for Congress to use in case of a nuclear war. During the height of the Cold War in , a top-secret project began to construct a bunker feet beneath The Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs.

The bunker opened in and remained on constant alert as a nuclear fallout shelter and emergency relocation facility for the U. After the Washington Post revealed the secret in , the bunker was decommissioned and is now open for public tours. His youngest brother Charles moved to western Virginia and in built an estate called Happy Retreat, out of which he set aside 80 acres for the creation of Charles Town, which was founded in and named in his honor.