Two things stand out in Jemar Tisby’s treatment of the Civil War in The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. The first, and most obvious: It was always about slavery, and that fact “has not been fully considered in the American church, even though 150 years have passed since the war” (72) The second: The “dilemma of slavery […] frayed the unity of the American church. The three most influential denominations at the time — Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians — all divided and fought over whether Christians could own slaves and remain in good standing” (75-76).
Add to that number a fourth. While most Lutherans at the time were immigrants, or, on the East Coast, the sons, daughters and grandchildren of immigrants who lived in free states and came from nations where slavery long had been outlawed, they also were split on the issue.
The Lutheran faith came to the United States with Lutheran immigrants from Europe. These immigrants banded together first in congregations and then in territorial synods, affiliations of several congregations. In 1820 a constitution was drafted to join several territorial synods into an organization known as the General Synod. According to Sydney Ahlstrom in his “Religious History of the American People,” by 1860 the General Synod had 164,000 communicants and comprised two-thirds of the Lutherans in the America. The other third were mostly recent immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia who preferred the doctrines, practices and language of the Lutheran Church of their native country to the American culture of the General Synod.
Like their Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian counterparts, they struggled with what the bible says about slavery. But Lutherans had another wrinkle — it was also a confessional issue.
A definition or two may be in order here. When we speak of confessions, we’re not talking about pulp magazine True Confessions or acknowledgements of guilt. We’re referring to the statements of faith in the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and the Formula of Concord of 1577. We also need to remember that in the mid-1800s American Lutherans were mostly split up into rather small ethnic synods. Freelance writer Susan Peterson sketches in a general outline of the Civil War Talk website:
The Lutheran faith came to the United States with Lutheran immigrants from Europe. These immigrants banded together first in congregations and then in territorial synods, affiliations of several congregations. In 1820 a constitution was drafted to join several territorial synods into an organization known as the General Synod. According to Sydney Ahlstrom in his “Religious History of the American People,” by 1860 the General Synod had 164,000 communicants and comprised two-thirds of the Lutherans in the America. The other third were mostly recent immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia who preferred the doctrines, practices and language of the Lutheran Church of their native country to the American culture of the General Synod.
In fact, the General Synod formally split in 1862 and 1863 over slavery. It was concentrated in the North — among third- and fourth-generation German-Americans in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and other long-settled states along the East Coast. But it came out against slavery in 1862, and in 1863 regional synods in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Southwestern Virginia formed the General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Confederate States, together with other synods in the South. The Southerners had informally broken off relations in 1861, and the breach wouldn’t be mended until 1918.
When the war came, different national groups in the more newly settled areas we now call the Midwest reacted differently.
In St. Louis, mostly German volunteers prevented a secessionist state militia unit from taking over a federal arsenal. Taking part in that fight, more like a brawl than a proper military engagement, was Lt. Franz Sigel, who went on to raise German-American troops who took credit, with some justice, for keeping Missouri in the Union. (The contemporary song embedded above pokes fun at them.) The situation was complicated; not only were a majority of Missourians pro-slavery, but the Germans belonged to Reformed as well as Lutheran churches, and many were avowedly secular Forty-Eighters who had fled Germany after the failed revolution in 1848. Missouri Synod Lutherans were split among themselves, with the hierarchy tending pro-slavery and lay people pro-Union.
Farther north in the upper Midwest, Norwegian and Swedish Lutherans, many of them united at the time in the Augustana Synod, also rallied around the flag. According to historian John Norton of Moline:
Gathering Civil War clouds brought uncertainty about the nation´s future, but also confirmed the strong opposition of Augustana leaders to the institution of slavery. By April of 1861, the war had begun, even as the Synod was laying the groundwork for its own future. Military volunteer recruiting started among Scandinavian immigrants throughout the Midwest, creating Swedish units in the DeKalb, Galesburg, Andover, and Bishop Hill areas. Among the first to volunteer was Lars Paul Esbjörn’s 24-year-old son Paul Wilhelm Esbjörn. He was also among the first to fall, at Lexington, MO in September 1861. Esbjörn´s younger son, Josef, also volunteered, and survived the war, to become a prominent publisher and political figure in both Illinois and Minnesota.
Then meeting in a Norwegian church building in Chicago, Augustana College lost most of its students as they “left the school to join the Union ranks in the Civil War, while an even greater number of prospective students enrolled instead as soldiers.” Adds Norton: “By 1862, a tired and saddened Esbjörn, only 53 years old, went back in Sweden himself.”
For the most part, however, the conflict among Lutherans was theological. Often, as might be expected, it took a peculiarly Lutheran turn.
Like everything else, it revolved around slavery. According to an article in Valparaiso University’s Cresset magazine by associate history professor Richard M. Chapman at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., Lutherans had taken a nuanced prior to the war. Some pietist groups, like the multi-ethnic Frankean Synod and the Norwegian Hauge Lutherans of the Eilasen Synod, strongly supported abolition. And Samuel Schmucker of the General Synod “firmly opposed chattel slavery and used his offices to bring young theologians into the fold of abolitionism.” But most Lutherans, largely on confessional grounds, were more ambivalent. Says Chapman:
Many probably harbored private qualms that slavery was immoral while outwardly, most tolerated or passively accepted the practice when they did not support it outright. Since racial slavery was the law of the land, tethered to the Constitution itself, Lutherans apparently followed a familiar pattern of firm, if not absolute, allegiance to the temporal governing authorities, as Martin Luther himself urged his followers at the time of the Knights’ Rebellion and the Peasants’ War of the 1520s.
This ambivalence about slavery, which was widely shared by Anglo-Americans, didn’t go away during the war. It came to a head in 1862, at the General Synod’s national convention in Lancaster, Pa. In a well-documented post about Lancaster’s 79th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, blogger “Vince” (a screen name) notes that the 100 or so delegates, “[w]ithout any dissenting Southerners present, […] finally forged a consensus to take a stand on the war’s meaning, the morality of slavery, and the emerging question of emancipation.” But, even with the war on and the Southerners gone, it took some doing.
Of five resolutions were put to the floor of the convention by a committee headed by William A. Passavant (for whom Jacksonville’s Passavant hospital is named), two supporting the war effort passed quickly and unanimously, the Lancaster/79th Pennsylvania blog continues. But the third declared the war to be “the natural result of the continuance and spread of domestic slavery in our land,” and endorsed a proposal by President Lincoln to fund a system of “constitutional emancipation.” It sparked a day-long debate and exacerbated another split, this one among northerners, that wouldn’t be resolved until the formation of the United Lutheran Church in America in 1918:
Some attendees criticized [the draft] for being too weak, claiming constitutional emancipation validated the ownership of people as property. Others spoke against endorsing such a specific means of ending slavery, saying that the Lutherans had no more right to prescribe specific policies for Congress as Congress had to prescribe how the Lutherans interpret the Augsburg Confession. Interestingly, the abolitionist Samuel Simon Schmucker of the Lutheran Seminary at Gettysburg suggested leaving out the subject of emancipation entirely due to the “unhappy effects” making statements on slavery had always had on other Synods.
The stance on slavery also had unintended consequences for the Lutherans, which was very divided by two distinct visions for the Lutheran Church in the New World in years following the Second Great Awakening. Pietists wanted to see a Lutheran Church emphasizing revivalism and spirituality in close union with other Protestants, while confessionalists stressed a stricter adherence to the Lutheran Confessions. In the next two General Synod meetings, in 1862 and 1864, the confessionalist-leaning Pennsylvania Ministerium [equivalent to an ELCA regional synod today] walked out and was locked out of proceedings. In 1866, the Pennsylvania Ministerium met again at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lancaster to announce the formation of a confessionalist national Lutheran church body. The “General Council” resulted, although it ultimately failed to meet expectations due to its inability to woo more conservative Midwestern Lutherans (e.g., the Missouri Synod).
But the General Council came later, and it doesn’t quite explain what was going on with the Missouri Synod at the time of the Civil War. While it’s true that the Rev. CFW Walther, its founder, believed slavery was sanctioned by scripture and took an extreme pro-Southern position, most of the laity were staunchly abolitionist and pro-Union.
Perhaps the best discussion appears in the comments on a 2011 Faculty Roundtable video posted to the LC-MS blog Concordia Journal Currents. Norman Teigen of Minnesota (a Norskie, by the sound of his name), who said the “theological battles of the Civil War, as Professor Mark Noll [of Notre Dame] has written, were settled by the two eminent theologians Ulysses Simpson Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman,” but asked for clarification on the where the LC-MS stood at the time. He also shed light on conflict among Norwegian Lutherans:
Walther’s influence on other Lutherans was profound as the professors [on the video] discuss. I am of the Norwegian branch of Lutheranism and my spiritual ancestors sought advice from Walther on the topic of slavery. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the Norwegians accepted Walther’s views on the subject rather than the better advice which they received from theologians in Oslo. The Waltherian view caused, I think the historical record will show, great sorrow within the Norwegian branch of the faith […] Incidentally, the Missouri Synod is still getting beaten up on slavery in recent days as a writer demonstrated earlier this summer in a local paper, The Metro Lutheran.
Will Schumacher, professor of historical theology at Concordia, replied:
It’s true that C.F.W. Walther (and a few others in the Missouri Synod) argued that slavery was not unbiblical. I would describe the position as “anti-abolitionist” rather than “pro-slavery,” because in fact neither Walther nor any of the other Saxons of his community ever owned slaves, as far as I know. Walther thought the Abolitionist movement went beyond the clear statements of Scripture when they made the abolition of slavery a religious crusade. […] Walther himself had southern sympathies, at least partly based on his esteem for the rights of the States and his loyalty to his adopted Fatherland (i.e., Missouri!). Remember that Missouri was a deeply divided border state, remaining with the Union but with legal slavery until 1863 (with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation). But those views were apparently not shared by a majority of people in the Missouri Synod at the time. Most German immigrants (including most Missouri Synod folks) were pro-Union and unambiguously anti-slavery. (This was true of most of the Wendish Lutherans in Texas, too, not just the Germans living in northern States.)
A pastor from Tennessee who attended the General Synod convention (quoted in a 2009 Journal of Lutheran Ethics article linked below), probably spoke for German Lutherans everywhere when he said,“I am the only minister who dares to pray for President Lincoln and the reason I am allowed to do it is because I pray in German and the rebels don’t understand German, but the Lord does.”
Links and Further Reading
“The 150 year history of Augustana College,” 2010, Augustana College, Rock Island, Ill. https://www.augustana.edu/about-us/sesquicentennial/150-year-history.
Darryl Black, “Religion and the Civil War,” American Battlefield Trust, Aug 27, 2021 https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/religion-and-civil-war.
Richard M. Chapman, “Just Enough? Lutherans, Slavery, and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” The Cresset, Trinity 2008 http://thecresset.org/2008/Trinity2008/Chapman_T2008.html.
John Norton, “The Torch Passed! Augustana after Esbjörn, The Esbjörns after Augustana,” Augustana Historical Society Newsletter, Spring 2009 https://augustanaheritage.augustana.edu/Esbjorn-Norton.pdf
Susan Peterson “Lutheran Church and the Civil War,” Civil War Talk, Feb. 4, 2013 https://civilwartalk.com/threads/lutheran-church-and-the-civil-war.80408/.
“C.F.W. Walther at 200,” Concordia Journal Currents, Aug. 15, 2011 [comments section] https://concordiatheology.org/2011/08/concordia-journal-currents-c-f-w-walther-at-200/.
John R. Stumme, ed., “A Lutheran Resolution on the Civil War and President Abraham Lincoln’s Response to a Lutheran Delegation” Journal of Lutheran Ethics, March 1, 2009 https://www.elca.org/JLE/Articles/395?fbclid=IwAR2yZk8ld-fITVIW6AioVTt1te4mfrw534b8UPs04GgDPULHoXHmQ7rb7IQ.
“Vince,” “The Lutherans Make a Statement on the War, Slavery, and Emancipation,” Lancaster at War: Lancaster and the 79th Pennsylvania Fight the Civil War, May 15, 2012 http://www.lancasteratwar.com/2012/05/lutherans-make-statement-on-war-slavery.html.
Wikipedia: Augsburg Confession, Camp Jackson affair, Eilsen Synod, Evangelical Lutheran General Synod of the United States of America, Formula of Concord, Forty-Eighters, Frankean Synod, General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America, Haugean movement, William A. Passavant, Franz Sigel, United Lutheran Church in America and United Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the South.
[Uplinked Feb. 28, 2024]
Ordinary Time 