United States General George B. McClellan is still hunkered down outside of Richmond with 105,000 Union troops. Yet Southern sentiment is a bit more positive now, as the enemy’s momentum has stalled. Today, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, in command of the Army of Northern Virginia since June 1, displays the tactical boldness that will come to characterize his military leadership from now until the end of the war. Sending General J. E. B. Stuart and his calvary to probe McClellan’s rear lines, Lee subsequently learns, following the four day reconnaissance mission in which Stuart circles around the entire Union Army, important information about the enemy’s position. Within weeks, Lee will begin putting the military intelligence to test in a successful effort to push McClellan out of Virginia.
Meanwhile, the language of Providence, under girded by a Calvinist theology long present among many Protestants of the South, continues to hang heavily over the Confederate nation. Baptists appropriate such language as much as anyone else, day after day exploring the relationship between God’s directives and human activity, driven by the ebb and flow of war news favorable or unfavorable to the fortunes of a country considered to be God’s chosen nation. Writer T. Pearson explores the dynamics of Providence and (although not by name specifically) Confederacy in this week’s North Carolina Baptists’ Biblical Index:
It is confessedly mysterious how human instrumentality and Divine agency blend in bringing about events. But the mystery of things is not a whit lessened in cutting the link that connects the two together, in virtually saying, let us loose our hold of the heavens above, and attach ourselves exclusively to the earth and things therein. Is the world’s history, or is individual history, less mysterious, by shutting out from the sphere of human things the Divine Providence, and leaving room for nothing but the operation of natural laws? Or rather is not all history, by such an exclusion, made much more mysterious than ever! In the one case, we have the human agency moving freely under the moral control of the Divine, we have in full play the elements of human action and piety, and yet mysterious relations. In the other case, we have only the human agent and the physical and moral laws, we have excluded the hand of God and taken away the elements of piety, and still the relations are mysterious. The choice then lies between a mysterious world in which God is ever present and ever felt, and a mysterious world that moves onward in its glorious evolutions without his continued agency. He is the better philosopher and the happier man who prefers the former; and he holds a key to things inscrutable which can never be solved by the man who chooses the latter.
Sources: “Army of Northern Virginia,” Encyclopedia of Virginia (link); “J.E.B. Stuart Rides Around the Union Army,” History.com (link); “Mystery With or Without Providence,” Biblical Recorder, June 11, 1862 (link)
