National Council on Public History

Exploring Faith and Freedom at the Gettysburg Seminary Ridge Museum

Barbara Franco

NCPH Working Group Case Statement

Gettysburg is one of the bloodiest and most destructive battles in the American civil War. Millions of visitors return year after year to the site of the battle as a place of reconciliation and renewal. Visitors often describe their visit as a spiritual experience and the Gettysburg Address has been interpreted both as a deeply religious text and as a call to action to complete the unfinished work for Freedom in America and around the world.

The 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, like preceding anniversaries, challenged us to ask better questions, help people understand that there were then and still are differing opinions and make sure that previously excluded stories are documented and shared.

One question that remains is what brought the States to war with each other. How did they then, and how do we today make sense out of the mayhem that resulted? New scholarship is looking more closely at the role of religion in the conflicts of the American Civil War.

The Gettysburg Seminary Ridge Museum opened on July 1^st, 2013 as a legacy project of the 150^th anniversary. The new museum is the result of a longstanding partnership between the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg and the local Adams County Historical Society.

The historic seminary building built in 1832 to house the Lutheran Theological Seminary was witness to the conflict of 1863. Today it houses the Gettysburg Seminary Ridge Museum, and the building itself is the main artifact and the basis for the museum’s exhibition entitled Voices of Duty and Devotion.

The museum interprets 3 stories that relate directly to the building. The 4^th floor exhibit of the First Day of the Battle begins with the iconic Cupola where Gen John Buford and his signal corps officer surveyed the landscape and established a Union strategy. The experience of the first day—morning, midday, afternoon and evening—is told through murals accompanied by maps, timelines, artifacts and personal stories that tell what happened. At the end of the day on July 1^st, the building was occupied by Confederates and already in use as a field hospital for the wounded.

The third floor covers the Care of the Wounded . Within the museum’s walls an estimated 600 Patients, their doctors and nurses dealt with the shocking aftermath of a 3-day battle that left an estimated 50,000 casualties of dead and wounded.

The second floor addresses issues of Faith and Freedom. Adams County, where Gettysburg is located, is situated on the border of the Mason Dixon Line and played a role in UGRR activities that involved white residents as well as the town’s free black community. At least 70 citizens of Adams County served in the USCT that were organized in 1863 following the Emancipation Proclamation. Seminary professors and students faced moral questions about the sinfulness of slavery as did most denominations and many individuals

Visitors tell us that they are especially interested in the interpretations of faith and freedom in the museum’s exhibits that suggest more complex intersections and a more integrated approach to history. The interactive computers allow visitors to make choices based on real experiences of people who faced a range of moral dilemmas in the Civil War period. Samuel Simon Schmucker, founder and President of the Lutheran Seminary, faced the dilemma of what to do when he acquired slaves through marriage to his Virginia-born wife. A Quaker family had to choose between following the law or their conscience when a fugitive slave comes to their door.

The Seminary Ridge Museum is uniquely situated at the intersection of these two ideas– Faith and Freedom—two ideas that have enormous power in how we define ourselves as Americans. Each of the stories the museum tells is important to understanding the Civil War, but its main contribution to new scholarship and deeper public understanding, is in fully exploring ideas of faith and freedom as they were understood in the 19^th century.

In the museum, we define Faith in the broadest sense to include the “intangible values and beliefs that add meaning to life.” –the shared beliefs that shape actions and decisions and create community– rather than as Religion– often understood as a specific and organized set of beliefs associated with a particular denomination or sect. Freedom too has multiple meanings and is often used interchangeably with liberty. The ability of the individual to make personal decisions based on individual conscience remains deeply embedded in American concepts of freedom. I’d like to take a few minutes to look at some of the reasons that these two ideas, faith and freedom came to play such an important role in 19^th century America.

The language of religious freedom and liberty remain linked as the 19^th century unfolded. Lorenzo Dow, an itinerant Methodist preacher in the early 19^th century, explicitly championed popular sovereignty and the connection between religion and freedom. In 1814 he wrote:

“But if all men are Born Equal and endowed with unalienable Rights by their Creator, in the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then there can be no just reason, as cause , why he may or should not think, and judge, and act for himself in matters of religion, opinion, and private judgment.” (Hatch p. 17)

Samuel Simon Schmucker, president of the Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary writing 30 years later on slavery, echoed similar language”.

“We believe that God has of one blood created all nations to dwell on the face of the earth, has endowed them all with the powers of moral agency, and invested them all with certain inalienable rights and obligations.”

But not everyone agreed with this definition of individual freedom. For Southern proponents of slavery, freedom relied on maintaining the social system and the class stratification that slavery provided.

For Thomas Roderick Drew, President of the College of William and Mary in Virginia ( 1802-1846) advancements in learning, communications, and morals depended on the freedom to pursue happiness, based on property rights and a state governed by propertied individuals. Only slavery, he thought, could discipline individual freedom and render progress wholesome and socially safe.

As Americans experienced common civic and religious beliefs from increasingly divergent perspectives, significant differences developed between North and South, whites and blacks. It was not surprising that denominations split. Within Protestant denominations, a war of words on the subject of slavery and doctrine preceded the cannons and swords.

Presbyterians officially separated in 1861, but the views of two Presbyterian ministers show how they were moving apart, long before the Civil War. Charles Grandison Finney converted in 1821 and became one of the leading revivalist preachers of the 2nd Great Awakening as a Presbyterian minister and then president of Oberlin College. His personal conversion and religious commitment convinced him that slavery was wrong and he devoted himself to the causes of revivalism, abolition and temperance. “Unless the will is free, man has no freedom; and if he has no freedom he is not a moral agent, that is, he is incapable of moral action and also of moral character.” Finney’s non-traditional style of fiery preaching, combining religious passion and common sense logic drew converts, it also drew criticism from more establishment clergy like Lyman Beecher and fellow Presbyterians.

Fellow Presbyterian, Rev. James Henley Thornwell of S.C., took a far different stance as a leading advocate of slavery. Unlike the unschooled Finney, he graduated from South Carolina College at nineteen, and studied at Harvard Divinity School. Thornwell staunchly defended biblical orthodoxy. Since there was no explicit condemnation of slavery in Scripture, only rules governing the behavior of slaves and masters, he argued that Christians should go no further than Scripture in mandating moral codes. Like other pro-slavery clergy, he advocated the benevolent qualities of southern slave owning in which slaves were part of the Christian master’s household. In an 1850 Sermon entitled The Rights and the Duties of Masters he said:

“The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground—Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity at stake.

Evangelical Baptists and Methodists also divided over the issue of slavery. Although John Wesley, a founder of the Methodist movement opposed slavery, some evangelical religious thinking changed over time from condemning to condoning slavery and finally espousing it as “ordained by God.” During the 2^nd Great Awakening—Baptists and Methodists in the south attracted African American and white converts to Christianity in large numbers through revivals and personal conversion.     The success of their mission work seemed to prove that they were following God’s plan.

White Baptists and Methodists came to see slavery as an opportunity to convert the enslaved. Baptist and Methodist missionaries then faced a dilemma: How to reconcile the enslavement of fellow Christians, who were no longer heathens as described in the Bible. To continue their plantation missions, evangelicals who remained in the south could not be associated with abolition if they wanted to continue their mission. Many already believed that religion and politics were best kept separate and preferred to avoid the issue of slavery rather than disrupt their congregational worship and the success of their conversions.

In 1831- Nat Turner’s rebellion undermined their earlier view that full participation in Christian worship was desirable for slaves. A deeply religious convert to Christianity, Turner received a vision from God telling him to rise up to free slaves. The uprising resulted in 45 white deaths and hundreds of blacks executed or murdered.

Increasingly white southern evangelicals believed that their black co-religionists needed continued oversight, paternalism and protection in order to be good Christians. They feared that any disruption of their proseletyzing mission would endanger the safety and salvation of African Americans who they now viewed as unsuited to freedom and better served under white protection in slavery.

Thornton Stringfellow, Pastor of Stevensburg Baptist Church in Culpeper, Virginia, became widely published as a pro-slavery advocate:

“It is to be hoped, that on a question of such vital importance as this to the peace and safety of our common country, as well as to the welfare of the church, we shall be seen cleaving to the Bible, and taking all our decisions about this matter, from its inspired pages.”

Radical abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator, were regarded as dangerous insurgents threatening the peace and safety. Deeply religious, Garrison’s message holding slave owners personally accountable for the sin of owning slaves and his unwillingness to accept anything less than immediate abolition, found support among Northern Methodists and Baptists.

While northern sermons, lectures and publications argued against slavery; southern clergy and writers retaliated with proslavery sermons and publications.

Moderates, both north and south might not have actively supported slavery, but they were at first willing to accept it as a necessary evil and societal sin rather than an individual sin. People –both north and south—gradually changed their opinions and became more willing to adopt radical positions— the positive good of slavery on the one hand versus the sin of slavery and the urgency of immediate abolition on the other.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was among those who became more radicalized while living in Cincinnati—a hotbed of antislavery activity. Her publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin served to popularize and expand opposition to slavery as nothing else had. In 1852 the book became an instant best seller—300,000 copies in the US in the first year and 1.5 million copies in Great Britain in a single year. The religious basis for opposition to slavery was explicit in the story’s characters and themes of sin and redemption.

“I wrote what I did” she explained, “because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity – because as a lover of my county, I trembled at the coming day of wrath.”

Catholics, growing in numbers through immigration— especially from Ireland—tried to remain aloof from the slavery controversy. Many were struggling to define what it meant to be an American Catholic in a pluralistic society. Anti-Catholic sentiment expressed fears that Catholicism was not compatible with freedom and a democratic government. While Pope Gregory XVI, issued an apostolic letter condemning the slave trade in 1839, politically, American Catholics tended to be democrats, supportive of southern positions. Abolitionists, who were more likely to be supporters of the Republican Party, were often blatantly anti-Catholic.

Jews in America also served on both sides. The 150^th anniversary of the Civil War has sparked new research for a PBS film Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray and a traveling exhibit, Passages through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War has brought new interest to this aspect of the religious history of the war. Jews were also divided over how Judaic laws should be followed in a changing world, splitting into reform and conservative branches. Prominent rabbis took opposing views of slavery that paralleled Christian clergy.

In 1865 after four long years and a now estimated 750,000 dead, both sides were still deeply divided. The Army and Navy Messenger, published March 1865, in Shreveport Louisiana wrote:

“The character of the war is, with us, essentially and necessarily religion…In its simplest form, the war with us [is} for freedom of conscience—freedom to interpret the Bible and worship God according to the dictates of our own consciences.”

Southern explanations about the meaning of the war developed into the “Lost Cause” interpretation that has survived into the 21^st century. Henry Ward Beecher, April 23, 1865 drew a different religious meaning from Union victory—“God, I think, has said, by the voice of this event to all nations of the earth, “Republican liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe.” Northern certainty of the virtue of their cause helped support ideas of American exceptionalism and world leadership.

The exhibit at the Seminary Ridge Museum makes the connection between the battle of Gettysburg, religious ideas and the long struggle for freedom in America. One comment from a visitor says it briefly but eloquently.

“You do not always have to agree with each other…You may not like how I feel and I may not like how you feel! But this is why all of these men died for our rights to agree or disagree. God Bless.”

Before we opened, we didn’t know how to assess visitor interest in the topic of religion. A preopening survey with the visitors lists of frequent visitors gave visitors a range of subjects and religion came in last as a subject of interest. But after opening, when we analyzed the responses of visitors on the talk back board in the museum, we got a very different response. The talk back board asks, “What do you think is the unfinished work for freedom?” Religion was the most frequent category of response, followed by peace and equality,

Many of the notes get into contemporary issues.

Gay Marriage in all states

We must all accept responsibility and personal vision for our own and each others freedom

Equal rights and the ability of the disabled to move from one state to another with their benefits intact.

To limit govt. control of our lives only then will we be truly free

Freedom of religion not from religion. This freedom brings all the others.

But what if God did not give you Faith? Shouldn’t you be free to doubt?

These are typical of the many responses that raise general issues of freedom, equality of opportunity, peace and tolerance. They also address specific questions about racism, reproductive rights, GLBT rights, women’s rights, politics and government.

Visitors to the museum come to learn about the past. They also come to learn about themselves. As Americans we may share many basic beliefs that bind us together as a nation, but we still remain deeply divided over issues of faith and freedom in an ever-changing world. Understanding how Americans 150 years ago dealt with these dilemmas, may help us better understand them today.

One comment from a visitor says it briefly but eloquently.

“You do not always have to agree with each other…You may not like how I feel and I may not like how you feel! But this is why all of these men died for our rights to agree or disagree. God Bless.”

The Museum is very interested in pursuing questions about how we can engage visitors in discussion about beliefs, the role of religion in interpretation of history. We hope to use exhibits and programs as a vehicle for connecting history with current day issues and dilemmas that involve religious beliefs and the role of faith in making choices and decisions.

Discussion