On Sunday, November 25, 1860, President-elect Abraham Lincoln visited Chicago. Through Farwell’s invitation, he agreed to come to Moody’s school, provided they expected no speech. After attending church in the morning, he got to the mission at noon.
Mr. Lincoln sat through the opening prayers and hymns, then rose to leave. But Dwight boldly put Lincoln on the spot as he announced, “Mr. Lincoln has come to see the school on condition that he not be asked to speak. But if he wishes to say a word before leaving, we all have our ears open.”
Lincoln made his way to the platform, then stopped, looked around, and said, “I was once as poor as any boy in the school, but I am now President of the United States, and if you attend to what is taught you here, some one of you may yet be President of the United States.” Following some brief remarks, Mr. Lincoln marched out of the school.
Lincoln’s short stay reminded Dwight of two strong opinions he held: he was an advocate for both the Union and abolition. Knowing little about the South, he considered most Southerners slave holders and felt that was wrong. He viewed the Civil War as a conflict between good and evil and would have been surprised to learn of the spiritual revival that swept through the Southern army.
After the firing on Fort Sumter, at least twenty-five members of Moody’s school joined the army. Moody himself held a pacifist view similar to the Quakers; he stated: “I felt that I could not take a gun and shoot down a fellow human being. In this respect I am a Quaker.” He also had the school to tend to, so he dismissed any idea of going into the military.
Chicago, too, found itself much embroiled in the war, primarily through the erection of Camp Douglas, a military city of tents, barrack huts, parade grounds, and guard rooms designed to mobilize and train the citizen army arriving in droves. The camp, located a few miles south of Chicago, soon exerted a certain amount of influence on Chicago. Dwight and his friend Benjamin Franklin Jacobs, a young real estate agent, were appointed by the fledgling Young Men’s Christian Association to provide Christian ministry to the new troops.
DWIGHT AND HIS FRIEND WERE APPOINTED TO PROVIDE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY TO THE NEW TROOPS.
So Dwight and Benjamin began regular services at Camp Douglas. The men from farms and small towns pouring into the camp seemed ripe for a spiritual harvest. After leading sheltered lives, they found themselves suddenly thrust into the midst of excitement, temptation, and uncertainty of going into combat.
From the beginning, servicemen showed interest in the meetings, and the YMCA met the growing demand for hymnbooks and other religious material. Dwight and Benjamin were thrilled from the outset with the meetings and the response when hundreds were led to seek Christ. Each night, Dwight returned to his room with several packs of surrendered playing cards, which he carefully stored in a corner of the YMCA rooms.
Writing to his mother, he gushed, “I am all taken up with this.” Then to assuage his mother, Dwight assured her when she complained about his not writing her often: “I think you would say God Bless you, go forward. I am drove more now than ever in my life.” He still had the responsibilities of Sunday school conventions and his own school as well and seemed to be in perpetual motion.
As the war continued, however, and the casualties began to come back to Camp Douglas, Dwight realized more than ever the sacredness of each individual life. Each life mattered to God, and each person needed the gift and assurance of eternal life.
Another dilemma faced him. He could no longer rely completely on Jacobs or others who knew how to preach. Dwight had a burning desire himself each time he met a soldier to tell him the power of Christ to save. He must conquer his shyness and fear of speaking to others! Then he could “talk with them about my Savior that seems so near me—Oh, what would life be without Christ?”
At every turn, he felt his lack, his inadequacy. When Dwight’s banker friend, Mr. Reynolds, hosted a dinner for ministers and laymen in the summer of 1861, one of the guests saw clearly Dwight’s “earnestness in seeking to lead persons to the Savior, and his intense thirst for the knowledge of the Bible; for the entire dinner time was taken by Mr. Moody in quoting verses and in asking the ministers to tell him ‘What does this verse mean?’ ” His wasted student life had come back to haunt him.
Farwell called Camp Douglas Dwight’s “kindergarten of training.” His promotion was rapid, and in the autumn, he considered becoming chaplain, but declined after friends in Chicago begged him not to join the army.
In the midst of his whirl of activity, Dwight wrote to his brother Samuel in January 1862: “I have some 500 or 800 people that are dependent on me for their daily food & new ones coming all of the time. I keep a sadall horse to ride around with to hunt up the poore people with & then I have a man to waite on the folks as they come to my office.” He continues somewhat wearily but with mild enthusiasm, “I have just raised money enough to erect a chapel for the soldiers at the camp 3 miles from the city. I hold a meetig down thare evry say & 2 in the city so you see I have 3 meetigs to atend to every day be side calling on the sick. And that is not all. I have to go into the countrey about every week to buy wood & provisions for the poore also coal weet meal & corn.”
He also shared with his brother in a rather sad tone, “I do not get 5 minuets a day to study so I have to talk just as it happens. I do not answer one letter out of 10 that I get—I cannot get time— it is 11 to 12 every night when I retire & am up in the morning at light. I wish you could come in some time about 1 to 3 o’clock in my office hours and see the people waiting to see me.”
DWIGHT TENDED TO MEASURE GODLINESS IN TERMS OF CEASELESS ACTIVITY.
Letters such as this one reveal the nonstop dynamo Dwight had become. He tended to measure godliness in terms of ceaseless activity, not according to the time spent with God alone. Still in his mid-twenties, he advocated going to church as much as possible and attending prayer meetings frequently. His motto, a good one, sums up his philosophy: “Do all you can to make the world better than you found it. Do all you can for Christ and then you will make others happy.”
In the spring of 1862 following the battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, the YMCA organized a trainload of doctors, nurses, medical students, and supplies to be sent to the front. Dwight accompanied the personnel and supplies. How his heart broke as he observed the casualties of war! He reported to a colleague: “I tell you you do not know how roughly the poore fellows are treated. I was on the battlefield before they had buried the dead; it was awful to see the dead laying around without being anyone to burrey them.” Dwight’s urgency to share Christ accelerated, especially in the light of war’s catastrophes.
En route to the Tennessee front, he conducted a prayer meeting in one car of the speeding train while a group of men played cards in an adjacent one! In the midst of wounded and dying men, Dwight witnessed the shattered limbs, the gangrene, the amputations often performed without chloroform, the deaths—and his heart ached. But he knew the urgent message he had to give these men who faced constant death was that of receiving Christ. Repeatedly, he asked them, “Are you a Christian?” When they answered affirmatively, Dwight knew he was in the Lord’s will.
Accompanying over 450 wounded men on a Tennessee River boat, Dwight and his companions “made up our minds we would not let a man die on the boat without telling him of Christ and Heaven—we would tell them of Christ as we gave them a cup of cold water.”
The war deeply affected Dwight, but he had some unfinished business with Emma Revell. The man she had originally fallen in love with was a prosperous shoe salesman; now that same man had become a children’s missionary and a preacher-at-large. Although Emma wondered where it would all end, she and Dwight were married in Chicago on Thursday, August 28, 1862. She was nineteen, and Dwight was twenty-five. After going “away on my wedding tower,” as Dwight expressed it, he and Emma moved into a tiny house on Chicago’s North Side.
Emma, ever the virtuous wife, set about most subtly to “tame” Dwight. She saw the potential in Dwight—what he could become given some slight adjustments! One of the first things she did was to throw away Dwight’s favorite patent shirts. He had boasted that he didn’t need to wash them for weeks on end! For the time being, she failed in making him eat regular or adequate meals. One of Emma’s greatest assets, however, was that she remained unflustered by the constantly changing events that whirled around Dwight. Dwight praised her in later years as the perfect companion: “She was the only one who never tried to hold me back from anything I wanted to do and was always in sympathy with every new venture.”
EMMA, EVER THE VIRTUOUS WIFE, SET ABOUT MOST SUBTLY TO “TAME” DWIGHT.
Even married life failed to slow Dwight down. When brother Samuel came for a brief stay in hopes of finding work, he noted, “Dwight is run from morning to night. He hardly gets time to eat. Camp Douglas is situated (there is about 17,00), he holds meetings down there most every night—it is a treat to go down there and hear the soldiers sing, which is about three hundred or four hundred gathered from most every state.” Samuel merely smiled when Dwight talked about religion, but Dwight kept praying for his entire family to come to the Savior.
Going to the war front at least nine times, Dwight ministered to multitudes of soldiers. He was under fire in January 1863 and among the wounded in the battle of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, as Rosecrans pushed toward Nashville. As he ministered, Dwight watched the dying find peace, until the certainty drilled into his consciousness that a person can know immediate, assured salvation.
“Chaplain, help me to die,” whispered a casualty of Murfreesboro in the early morning hours. “I’ve been fighting Christ all my life. I had a prayer mother, and I disregarded her prayers always.”
Dwight read promise after promise from scripture, “but he could not see them and I got nearly discouraged.” Then Dwight began to read the story of Nicodemus from the Gospel of John. As he read, Dwight noted “[The boy’s] eyes became riveted upon me, and he seemed to drink in every syllable.” Dwight came to the passage, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.’ ”
The soldier interrupted weakly, “What’s that? Is that true? I want you just to read that again. That’s good! Won’t you read it again?”
So, Dwight read the passage a second and then a third time, and in the flickering candlelight, he glimpsed the soldier’s troubled face give way to a peaceful smile. As Dwight stood by the empty cot the next morning, the orderly informed him that the soldier had died restfully, murmuring the words of promise.
Spending much of his time moving in and around the wounded men, Dwight had a firsthand opportunity to minister and share his faith with them. Primarily, Dwight seemed to be acutely tuned to the heart needs of the sick and wounded men. More and more he would be invited to speak at gatherings, as well.
His experiences in the war vastly changed Dwight. Gone was the diffident, self-conscious amateur; by the fourth year, he had become a practiced, if homespun, preacher. In the spring of 1864, Major General Oliver Otis Howard, one of the Union generals, wrote of Dwight’s effectiveness: “I was bringing together my Fourth Army Corps. Two divisions had already arrived and were encamped in and near Cleveland [Tennessee]. Our soldiers were just about to set out on what we all felt promised to be a hard and bloody campaign, and I think we were especially desirous of strong preaching. Crowds and crowds turned out to hear Moody. He showed them how a soldier could give his heart to God.” Howard then gives his estimate of Dwight’s preaching; “His preaching was direct and effective, and multitudes responded with a promise to follow Christ.”
HIS EXPERIENCES IN THE WAR VASTLY CHANGED DWIGHT.
One of the soldiers who attended the meetings said that he “was much impressed with [Dwight’s] earnestness. I wasn’t at the time a Christian, though the thought had come to me that it would be well to begin the Atlanta campaign a soldier of Christ as well as a soldier of my country.” After hearing the message one particular evening, “I went to my dog tent, opened a little copy of the New Testament, and began to read and pray my way into the kingdom of Christ. The joy of salvation came to me after a few days. I have always looked on Mr. Moody as my spiritual father.”
As this company of soldiers left to fight in the Atlanta campaign and the March to the Sea, Dwight Moody returned to Chicago to some campaigns of another kind. However, he returned a much different individual than the haphazard minister who had left. He had acquired some poise and polish, but more than that, he understood what God required of him: to reach the souls of men.