Even as U.S. President Abraham Lincoln seeks to understand God’s purpose in the war, his present faith journey hearkening back to his Baptist roots, white Baptists of the South join white southerners at large in mocking Lincoln in ways vivid and cruel.
The Athens Georgia Southern Watchman newspaper, read by many Baptists of the city and surrounding area, offers the following commentary about Lincoln (and echoes imagery not infrequently found in Baptists newspapers of the South during the war years):
There is no doubt that, in addition to being a great blackguard, the creature who has become Dictator of the Northern Despotism is besides a great fool. His position on the slavery question will, of course, drive from his support all the so-called “Union men” in Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware who are not downright abolitionists. We are glad of this, as were when his fool blunders drove Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas into the Southern Confederacy. So, upon the whole, we rejoice in the consciousness that he is a fool. A man of ability in his place might have given the Southern Confederacy great trouble.
But besides being a fool, old Abe exhibits a degree of cool impudence which is really astounding. He still calls the people of the Southern States “insurgents” and the gallant men belonging to our sea militia “pirates.” This is cool, coming from a besotted old wretch, who, if justice were meted out to him under that Constitution which he profaned and by that Government he has perverted to the purposes of fanaticism, would have been “hung as high as Hanfan long ago for treason!
Accusing Lincoln of treason is only one way in which white southerners exhibit remarkable audacity toward the United States while wrapping themselves in the mantle of purity and morality. Alongside hatred of Lincoln is the constant war-time refrain, this week noted again in North Carolina Baptists’ Biblical Recorder newspaper, of the “heroic South” whose defenders are the ideological descendants of America’s “revolutionary forefathers.”
For now, the South boasts of military achievements “brilliant and prodigious.” Southern writers gloat over the hapless United States. “Eight months have elapsed and the braggart giant is still far from the easy victory he promised himself as when he began the struggle.”
The triumphant boasting, however, will prove to last but a season.
Source: “Old Lincoln’s Message,” Southern Watchman, December 19, 1861 (link); “The True Test,” Biblical Recorder, December 18, 1861 (link)
