Good Friday at Stones River

Friday, April 18

The intersection between Good Friday and some of our experiences down here has been rolling around in my head of late.  A few coincidences:

• On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theater.  Within hours of his death, commentators were observing the connection between that date and Good Friday.  Ohio Assemblyman James Garfield, who would later become another assassinated President, commented shortly after Lincoln's death, "It may be almost impious to say, but it does seem that his death parallels that of the Son of God."  In a 2006 editorial on April 14, 2006, also a Good Friday, Richard Wrightman Fox reports that many evangelical preachers lost little time in making the direct analogy.  "Jesus Christ died for the world," said the Rev. C. B. Crane in Hartford. "Abraham Lincoln died for his country."  Fox continues his commentary, "Most American Christians turned to the Jesus analogy because they realized how much they loved Lincoln. They took his loss as personal, often comparing it to a death in the family. Many felt attached to Lincoln almost as they felt attached to Jesus. The striving rail-splitter from Illinois and the simple carpenter from Nazareth resembled them, the people.  In contrast, while still heroic, Washington seemed more distant, even aloof."  As I am finishing David Goldfield's America Aflame I am reminded over and over and over again of the influence of evangelical Christianity - both in the South and North - on how the Civil War was interpreted, reinterpreted, and continues to be re-interpreted.  Just this morning I heard again about how the cause of the war was NOT slavery; it was states' rights.  The fact that the Articles of Secession began with the need to retain the institution of slavery seems to  be irrelevant.
• On April 10, 2009, a significant tornado blew through Murfreesboro, killing two, destroying block after block of structures, and taking out many trees here on the Battlefield.  The April 10 issue of the local paper just wrote of the five-year anniversary of that tornado, headlined "Good Friday Tornado Remembered."  
• One can't help but live daily down here without being reminded of the impact on the Civil War on daily lives.  The descriptions of what was left in parts of Georgia and South Carolina in the wake of Sherman's march are horrific.  I can't even imagine what homeowners, wives, children felt as they saw the destruction.  "The Federals entered homes and absconded with everything they could carry, leaving the residents, mainly women and children, unmolested.  ... In Columbia the Federals emptied a  barrel of molasses, and then tracked it all over a house.  They attired their horses in women's dresses and impaled chickens on their bayonets dripping blood on imported carpets" (America Aflame, pp348-9).  Reading and thinking about all this, I read this Good Friday morning from the Lament of Jeremiah,  "My soul is bereft of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, 'Gone is my glory and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.'"  Can you imagine how those words might have sounded to those southern women confronted with the remnants of their homes?  

It is a hard place to be; these are hard stories to tell.  But tell them we must.  They are the stories of real people and they are true.