Storm of Words: Science, Religion, and Evolution in the Civil War Era

By Monte Harrell Hampton

A study of the ways that southern Presbyterians in the wake of the Civil War contended with a host of cultural and theological questions

Southern Presbyterian theologians enjoyed a prominent position in antebellum southern culture. Respected for both their erudition and elite constituency, these theologians identified the southern society as representing a divine, Biblically ordained order. Beginning in the 1840s, however, this facile identification became more difficult to maintain, colliding first with antislavery polemics, then with Confederate defeat and reconstruction, and later with women’s rights, philosophical empiricism, literary criticisms of the Bible, and that most salient symbol of modernity, natural science.

As Monte Harrell Hampton shows in Storm of Words, modern science seemed most explicitly to express the rationalistic spirit of the age and threaten the Protestant conviction that science was the faithful “handmaid” of theology. Southern Presbyterians disposed of some of these threats with ease. Contemporary geology, however, posed thornier problems. Ambivalence over how to respond to geology led to the establishment in 1859 of the Perkins Professorship of Natural Science in Connexion with Revealed Religion at the seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. Installing scientist-theologian James Woodrow in this position, southern Presbyterians expected him to defend their positions.

Within twenty-five years, however, their anointed expert held that evolution did not contradict scripture. Indeed, he declared that it was in fact God’s method of creating. The resulting debate was the first extended evolution controversy in American history. It drove a wedge between those tolerant of new exegetical and scientific developments and the majority who opposed such openness. Hampton argues that Woodrow believed he was shoring up the alliance between science and scripture—that a circumscribed form of evolution did no violence to scriptural infallibility. The traditionalists’ view, however, remained interwoven with their identity as defenders of the Lost Cause and guardians of southern culture.

The ensuing debate triggered Woodrow’s dismissal. It also capped a modernity crisis experienced by an influential group of southern intellectuals who were grappling with the nature of knowledge, both scientific and religious, and its relationship to culture—a culture attempting to define itself in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9780817387624

Book preview

Storm of Words

RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE

SERIES EDITORS

John M. Giggie

Charles A. Israel

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Catherine A. Brekus

Paul Harvey

Sylvester A. Johnson

Joel W. Martin

Ronald L. Numbers

Beth Schweiger

Grant Wacker

Judith Weisenfeld

Storm of Words

SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND EVOLUTION IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA

Monte Harrell Hampton

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2014

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Caslon

Cover photograph: Earth, Waters, and Air. © Stanislav Butygin | Dreamstime.com

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hampton, Monte.

Storm of words : science, religion, and evolution in the Civil War era / Monte Harrell Hampton.

    pages cm. — (Religion and American culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1831-4 (trade cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8173-8762-4 (e book)

1. Presbyterian Church—Southern States—History—19th century. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. 3. Christianity and culture—United States. 4. Religion and science. I. Title.

BX8962.H36 2014

285’.17509034—dc23

2013049665

For Dobb

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Presbyterian and Orthodox Idiosyncrasy of Mind

2. Navigating by the Pole-Star: The Engagement with Modernity

3. A New and Frisky Science: Race, Religion, and the Response to Anthropology

4. The Fidelity of a Handmaid: Genesis and Geology in the Presbyterian South

5. A Revolution in Our Church: Founding and Filling the Perkins Professorship

6. The Serpent-Trail of Rationalism

7. A Crown Pure and Bright: The Southern Presbyterian Evolution Controversy

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I have been thinking about science, religion, and the American South for a long time. I had the original idea for this book many years ago while reading E. Brooks Holifield's The Gentlemen Theologians, a work assigned in an independent study with John David Smith, who was simply responding to a (very green) student's stated interests in religious history and southern history. Not only did Holifield's work provide scholarly inspiration, its brief mention of the Woodrow affair intrigued me with the possibility of a project weaving together religion, southern history, and science. Several years and incarnations later, that seed has turned into the present volume.

Numerous individuals have contributed to the shape of this book. I owe each of them a debt of gratitude for any positive contributions it may make, but, of course, accountability for any of its shortcomings belongs to me alone. Scholars who read partial or complete versions and provided invaluable criticism include Ronald Numbers, David Livingstone, George Marsden, Michael O'Brien, Mark Noll, Ed Harrell, Paul Kemeny, and Brooks Holifield. Without those who helped with earlier incarnations of the project at North Carolina State University and then the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this work would not have grown to fruition. The former group includes Will Kimler, Jim Crisp, and Bruce Mullin. The latter includes Harry Watson, Michael McVaugh, Fitz Brundage, Jim Leloudis, John Shelton Reed, Grant Wacker (of Duke University), and especially Don Mathews. Even after years under his mentoring, I still cannot bring myself to address my former professor merely as Don. While this reticence may in part be attributable to my southern upbringing, it is mostly due to my immense respect for him. I will always regard his prodigious scholarship, profound knowledge of the primary materials of American religious history, and poetic sensibility as gifts of grace, which I did not deserve.

I also wish to acknowledge the kind patience of the members of my church, for the years of my research and writing of this book were also years that I spent in full-time ministry. For them and for me, the relationship of scripture to the larger worlds of nature, culture, and society transcended the sometimes cloistered world of the academy, constantly reminding me that ideas have consequences in the lived world.

I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to the members of my family, both extended and immediate. Jeff Young tirelessly acted as a sounding board for my incessant streams of consciousness, and I treasure his friendship and keen intellect. No doubt the earliest seeds of this project were planted unwittingly by my parents, who not only reared me in the South but also bequeathed to me a love of nature and scripture. For their love and support I am eternally grateful. Most of all, I thank my wife and children, for whom my fixation on questions of science and religion must have felt at times like little more than a distraction from our life together. Their love and unfailing patience sustained me and continually reminded me of what was, and continues to be, most important in my life.

Introduction

When John Brown ascended the gallows in December 1859, he elicited little sympathy from southern whites. His conviction that his Calvinist God had anointed him to purge the commonwealth of the scourge of slavery notwithstanding, they believed his execution for the raid on Harpers Ferry was just. Despite their wide divergence from his compunctions concerning the institution of slavery, many southern whites did share with Brown the conviction that they held a perspective on this vexed question that was nothing less than the perspective of God. Slavery, they reassured themselves, enjoyed the sanction of the Bible and divine providence. The overnight apotheosis of Brown as a martyr for the cause of abolitionism terrified the already vigilant apologists for slavery, whose fears of a Republican conspiracy to overthrow the peculiar institution drove them mercilessly to clamp down on even the slightest hints of equivocation on slavery's status as the epitome of enlightened, Christian civilization. Rumors of such intimidation and censorship began drifting northward, giving credence to a parallel northern paranoia about a vast slaveholding conspiracy, conferring new credibility on abolitionism in the North, and signaling that southern whites might no longer be able to defend slavery from within the political system. So, the noose that tightened around John Brown's neck in 1859 also threatened to choke the life out of slavery and, as southern whites feared, southern civilization. Proslavery polemicists, among the most prominent of whom were Southern Presbyterian ministers like James Henley Thornwell and Benjamin Morgan Palmer, now stepped up their identification of slavery, southern civilization, and the will of God. Palmer declared from his pulpit in New Orleans, for instance, that it was the South's providential trust . . . to conserve and perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery. Slavery, he said, was interwoven with our entire social fabric and had moulded the very type of our civilization. Moreover, it was sanctioned in the Scriptures of God. Into the Civil War and for decades beyond, southern identity would be strongly rooted in religion.¹

Across the Atlantic, in another 1859 event that would in due course carry implications for faith and cultural identity, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species. Its publication would dictate the terms of the discourse about science and religion for the next seventy years and beyond. American reaction to Darwin's monograph, and to his notion of organic evolution via natural selection, would ultimately prove spirited, multifaceted, and seemingly interminable, but it would not commence in earnest until the 1870s. Through the 1860s, secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction commanded the lion's share of Americans’ attention. Most religious publicists were more interested in God's will for the future of nations than in God's relationship with the functioning of nature.

One American who did take notice almost immediately, however, was the Swiss émigré and scientific celebrity Louis Agassiz. In November 1859 he received a letter from Darwin along with a copy of the On the Origin of Species. Agassiz had already garnered renown for his work on fossil fishes and the Ice Age; his reaction to Darwin's thesis would be important for its general reception in the transatlantic world. Precisely as Agassiz assayed the Origin, however, he was breaking ground on an institution that he would come to envision as a bastion of antievolutionism, his Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Agassiz's fieldwork and the philosophical idealism he acquired under German mentors had years before convinced him of the immutability of species; similarities between organisms past and present simply suggested common origin in the same divine mind, which had gradually manifested itself in the unfolding epochs of natural history. God had created all the earth's extinct and existing flora and fauna in successive waves of creation and catastrophe, and this, not the transmutation posited by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Lorenz Oken, or the anonymous author of The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, accounted for the progression in the fossil record. Agassiz had regaled packed lecture halls throughout America with his evidence of these successive creations from paleontology, geology, embryology, and zoology. Bright young students traveled to Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School to sit at the feet of the master naturalist. When the smoke of war cleared, and Americans focused more closely on Darwin's work, Louis Agassiz emerged as arguably the leading scientific opponent of Darwinism. Even when by the 1870s the American scientific community had shifted from its early dismissal of evolution toward acceptance of the theory in modified, less Darwinian form, Agassiz did not budge. He insisted that God, by successive creations and catastrophes, had directly originated each set of organisms now preserved in the fossil-bearing strata according to his divine master plan. From the perspective of conservative religionists Agassiz's position hardly comported with conventional readings of Genesis. Despite the less than orthodox form that it took, however, Agassiz's resolute creationism earned him a position as a darling of antievolution theologians.

The importance of Darwin and Agassiz to the late-nineteenth century interaction between science and religion has been duly noted. Scholars have paid far less attention to this interaction as it unfolded in the American South. But the postbellum South was more than Civil War monuments, populist uprisings, and Jim Crow proscription. In addition to the challenges presented by military defeat, economic devastation, and millions of federally enfranchised freedmen, the relationship between science and religion was being addressed by important white intellectuals in the South. When study of the late nineteenth-century relationship between science and religion is broadened to include the American South, 1859 becomes significant for this relationship in a third way: in addition to the appearance of On the Origin of Species and the inauguration of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Southern Presbyterians founded their Perkins Professorship of Natural Science in Connexion with Revealed Religion in that year. Established at their seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, this academic position was among the first of a flurry of such academic chairs established in nineteenth-century transatlantic academia. The Southern Presbyterian theologians who figured so prominently in supplying their section with biblically based proslavery apologetics also led the way in relating contemporary science to scripture in the South. As shall become clear in this book, these two engagements were not unrelated.

Worrying that intellectual developments over the past generation might jeopardize the historic alliance between science and scripture, Southern Presbyterians fully expected the occupant of the Perkins chair to assuage their concerns. And they had every reason to think he would, for they appointed James Woodrow, an ordained Presbyterian minister whose credentials included not only scientific training under the great Agassiz himself but also a commitment to theological orthodoxy, of which Agassiz was distressingly devoid. But while Agassiz went to his grave in 1873 a dedicated antievolutionist, his protégé, James Woodrow, came to believe by the 1880s that some kind of natural evolution was probably true. Unlike many other late nineteenth-century theologians who espoused evolution, Woodrow did not blend his evolutionism with higher criticism or any other type of theological liberalism. Insisting that he believed in biblical inerrancy every bit as strongly as when he had affirmed it in his inaugural address as the Perkins Professor, Woodrow maintained that evolution and Genesis need not be regarded as enemies. The Bible, he argued, did not intend to teach science. Genesis stated only the fact of creation, not the mode God had employed in creating. Believing the Bible's silence on the latter freed him to look to science for guidance, Woodrow found the scientific evidence in favor of evolution convincing. Evolution, he wrote, was God's method of creating. Any suspicions that Woodrow's affirmation of biblical infallibility was disingenuous were belied by his exception of Eve from the evolutionary process. Since scripture did clearly specify the mode God had used in creating Eve, Woodrow maintained that he had created the first woman by fiat, from the rib of the sleeping Adam. The Bible had not so elucidated God's method of creating Adam, however, since the generic dust from which he was made, Woodrow reasoned, was likely a scriptural metaphor for organic matter.

Despite thus deferring to biblical literalism, and despite the decidedly theistic cast of his evolutionism, Woodrow soon became embroiled in a heated controversy that raged in the Southern Presbyterian Church from 1884 through the end of the decade. The episode—the first extended evolution controversy in American history—not only convulsed the entire Southern Presbyterian Church, eventually deposing its self-appointed expert on science and religion, it also captured the attention of the nation. National and denominational presses covered the dramatic story, placing evolution, theology, and the South before the eyes of America. Scientific developments during the nineteenth century had precipitated repeated theological adjustments from most American Protestant groups, which sought to maintain the hallowed conviction that science was the faithful handmaid of theology. Though these religious communities often made room even for evolution, at least when shorn of its Darwinian materialism, the Southern Presbyterian Church erupted in a firestorm of controversy—fully forty years prior to the Scopes Trial—over attempts by a handful of its leading lights to make accommodations to a purportedly biblicist brand of evolution. The first large-scale evolution controversy in American history occurred in the 1880s among Southern Presbyterians—and not among their theological cousins outside the South or among fellow southerners of other denominations—because of a unique combination of theological assumptions about the nature and interpretation of scripture and the historical experience of sectional strife, Civil War defeat, and Reconstruction.

Southern Presbyterians’ handling of science and religion manifested in concentrated form a larger commitment to bring the universally and eternally applicable standard of the Bible to bear on the problems of the contemporary South. While ministers and theologians in this disproportionately influential southern denomination had maintained this commitment with relative ease in earlier decades, beginning with antislavery in the 1850s they would face repeated challenges to the facile identification of scripture and southern culture. Their solid world violently shaken by the midcentury traumas of sectional strife, war, and Reconstruction, Southern Presbyterian theologians like Benjamin M. Palmer, Robert L. Dabney, George Armstrong, John Adger, and John L. Girardeau entered the postbellum period determined to steer their church and the South safely through the confusing currents of modernity. Though other theologians also scrutinized modernity through the prism of religious convictions, these Southern Presbyterians perfected an apologia that identified biblical orthodoxy as the basis of southern culture, and southern culture as the protector of the authority of scripture. Even their erstwhile brethren in the Northern Presbyterian Church—including Old School stalwarts like Charles Hodge and his colleagues at Princeton—had discredited themselves by refusing to join southerners in unequivocally rejecting antislavery as a patently unscriptural social system. As a result, for two decades after Appomattox, Southern Presbyterians repulsed Northern Presbyterian attempts to reunite with them. Though Northern Presbyterians had rejected the liberal theological trends often associated with abolitionists’ use of the Bible and continued to affirm the infallibility of scripture, their record was nevertheless tinctured with an abolitionist spirit, at least in the eyes of their southern counterparts. Indeed, these Southern Presbyterians saw the skulking specter of abolitionism everywhere they looked in the decades after the Civil War. In response, they deployed their southern-biblicist apologia on such varied issues as race, commercialism, egalitarianism, women's rights, public education, numerous philosophical and theological quandaries, and—arguably of greatest symbolic significance to the question of modernity—modern science.²

Developments within contemporary science seemed most explicitly to express the rationalistic spirit of the age and to threaten the long-held Protestant conviction that reason and revelation were complementary, that science was the faithful handmaid of theology. Indeed, such concerns lay behind the establishment of the Perkins Professorship. The chair was at once an institutionalization of Southern Presbyterians’ conviction that reason and revelation were compatible and also a tacit admission of disquiet about the well-being of the alliance. If many thinkers outside the South were handling this relationship carelessly, however, they could certainly expect James Woodrow to bring southern-biblicist orthodoxy to the task. Woodrow was an ardent southerner of sound convictions who proved his southern patriotism by producing medicines and munitions during the war as a Confederate chemist. By the 1880s, however, Southern Presbyterians’ handpicked expert was maintaining that evolution did not contradict scripture, and that it was in fact God's method of creating. The resulting controversy arose not so much from Southern Presbyterians’ vaunted adherence to scripture as from the hermeneutic assumptions they brought to scripture. Like many other Protestants, they had entered the nineteenth century with a confessional, literalistic hermeneutic that prized commonsense readings of the Bible and comported well with a philosophical temper influenced by Scottish Common Sense Realism. This disposition included a confident epistemological conviction that the acquisition of truth—whether of the scriptural or scientific variety—had little to do with the perspective of its seeker, but was a quest to be pursued without regard to time and place and one producing results of direct and universal applicability.

Other nineteenth-century Protestant communities—especially those with a Reformed heritage—had approached the Bible in the same way, but several trends had begun to undermine the hegemony of Common Sense epistemology by midcentury. The spectacle of northern and southern conservatives dividing over the question of the biblical position on slavery, the rise of biblical criticism in American seminaries, and shifts in philosophies of science away from the strict inductivism of antebellum times toward greater appreciation of the role of hypothesis had elevated the role of perspective in the acquisition of truth—at least outside the borders of the Reformed South. While southerners less connected to a Calvinist lineage and Calvinists outside the South might enlarge the role of the interpreter of scripture (or the student of nature), the experience of military defeat and Reconstruction merely hardened the Southern Presbyterian conviction that only one reading of science and nature was possible, that theirs was the correct reading, and that divergence from this amounted simply to dishonesty or intellectual sloth. They expected James Woodrow to defend this position, and in many ways Woodrow himself expected to do so, but the ensuing debates revealed a latent divergence among the southern-biblicist apologists themselves over the proper relationship between science and scripture, what it meant to be faithful to scripture, and the connection of such questions to southern cultural identity.

These debates over science and religion, the broader attempt to bring the Bible to bear on the intellectual, cultural, and social questions of the day, and the related questions of southern identity shed light on numerous important aspects of southern and American history, many of which continue to inform similar ongoing discussions in the present. Arguments over the renaming of streets and bridges, disputes over the Confederate battle flag, and neo-Confederate websites—some of which favorably highlight the thinking of Robert L. Dabney—bring reminders that questions addressed in the mid- to late-nineteenth century remain live issues in contemporary American culture. Such phenomena help spur the ever-growing literature on Civil War memory and southern identity. The Southern Presbyterian intellectuals addressed in this book played a seminal role in both antebellum proslavery polemics and the postwar development of the Lost Cause myth. These same theologians and ministers made the most significant southern contribution to the important nineteenth-century dialogue concerning science and religion. From the high-stakes disputation over the origin of human races in the 1840s and 1850s through the discourse over Genesis and geology concerning the history of the earth to the first prolonged American evolution debate in the 1880s, their deliberations wove together issues of science, scripture, and southern culture. Hence, this book seeks to examine these topics not in isolation from each other but as parts of an interconnected whole.³

Aside from the question of whether scholarly treatment of Civil War memory and southern identity has sufficiently incorporated the long and culturally important conversation over science and religion, the history of science and religion in the mid- to late-nineteenth century South has received little scholarly attention of any kind. While historians have addressed science in the South before the Civil War, postbellum southern science has garnered scant notice.⁴ And though scholarly and popular appetite for stories about the relationship between religion and science appears insatiable, few historians have focused on this relationship as it played out in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century South. The Scopes Trial has captured the attention of numerous scholars, and for good reason, because the evolution controversy is a perpetual (and almost exclusively) American cultural phenomenon. But America's first extended controversy over evolution, which one leading Southern Presbyterian called a storm of words, occurred within the Southern Presbyterian Church in the 1880s and 1890s. The theory of evolution did not precipitate such a storm among southern religious communities with different theological orientations. Neither did it cause significant controversy among Southern Presbyterians’ theologically Reformed cousins outside the South—in Princeton, Scotland, or Ulster. Nor did that other southern Presbyterian protégé of Louis Agassiz, Joseph LeConte, who after the Civil War left the Reconstruction South for a professorship at the fledgling University of California at Berkeley, find anything problematic in the notion of transmutation. One of the objectives of this book, then, is to explain why the first real controversy over evolution in American history broke out when and where it did.⁵

As numerous historians have demonstrated, American and British Christianity in the late nineteenth century generally came to peaceful terms with evolution. They have shown that the widespread tendency to think of science and theology as necessarily mortal foes owes more to the military metaphors employed by a couple of highly influential late nineteenth-century polemical works than to careful study of how religionists actually responded to evolution. To be sure, the response of nineteenth-century American religion to evolution was not monolithic; some opposed evolution outright, while others accommodated it only in mutated forms that were designed to square with teleology (divine design). Still, most American Christians, including evangelicals, found ways to accommodate evolution.⁶

Ronald Numbers has led the way in documenting this generally peaceful relationship. He has also cowritten a short treatment of the Woodrow affair, which in the main plugs it into the nonmilitaristic interpretation. Highlighting the existence of southern Christians who espoused or made room for evolution, Numbers successfully prevents the characterization of the nineteenth-century South as a region uniformly opposed to transmutation. Yet instances of support for evolution cannot obscure the larger pattern of antievolutionism in the Southern Presbyterian evolution controversy. The bigger question is why the first extended evolution controversy in America occurred in the South. Overarching surveys of the Protestant or American or Anglo-American responses to evolution likely cannot answer this question. Instead, closer studies that examine the actual dynamics of a particular religious community's engagement with science are needed. Such an approach reveals subtle but important differences in its members’ intellectual habits—exactly how they thought of the Bible, deployed scripture, and conceived science—and how their intellectual idiosyncrasies were related to the social and cultural constraints that were their burden and birthright as southerners.⁷

In addition to explicating the origins of the American evolution controversy and exploring how underlying conceptions of scripture and science were related to southern identity, this study casts light on southern intellectuals’ experience of modernity. Though the term has been used with maddening variety, Marshall Berman's definition provides a useful starting place for examining how these important southern thinkers experienced modernity. Berman defines modernity as an ambivalent desire simultaneously to embrace the beneficial aspects of contemporary change while desiring to be rooted in a stable past. Reformed communities had, since the Protestant Reformation, expressed this ambivalence theologically in that they affirmed adherence to an immutable, eternal, and universally applicable biblical standard while also affirming the (sometimes chaotic) ability of all individuals correctly to appropriate the principles of the Bible, regardless of the diverse historical situations from which they approached it. In the case of Southern Presbyterians, therefore, modernity refers not so much to any particular development of the late nineteenth century—such as industrialization, commercialization, or secularization—as to an ambivalent impulse to engage intellectually all contemporary developments, whether political, social, cultural, theological, or scientific. Their Calvinist heritage demanded that they engage all current problems, providing the universal biblical principles relevant to all of the day's leading issues. On the other hand, their southern heritage inclined them to resist disconcerting changes, particularly those that appeared to emanate from outside the faithful region. The irony of the southern-biblicist apologia was that while it claimed to defend the universality of biblical authority, its hermeneutic approach particularized the scriptures, unwittingly pouring them into a Dixie-shaped mold. A modern reader might wonder, for instance, whether the Bible so clearly mandated slavery, prohibited women's suffrage, opposed public education, or demanded a rejection of Henry Grady's New South program on theological grounds. Many Southern Presbyterians did not doubt that these were its universally applicable teachings. Divergence from these teachings could only mean social, cultural, and spiritual decline, and rejecting such departures was easy enough when they emanated from outside the South. The teachings of James Woodrow, however, brought a latent divergence within these southern religionists’ conception of science and religion to the surface. In doing so, they catapulted an influential group of southern intellectuals into a crisis of modernity that centered on the nature of knowledge—about God and about nature—and its relationship to culture. This epistemological tension constituted a most acute form of modernity crisis for a community whose members’ very identity as Christian intellectuals inhered in their ability to interpret nature and scripture concordantly, to arbitrate between reason and revelation, and whose identity as post–Civil War southerners required that they manifest their southern-biblicist orthodoxy to the world.⁸

1

The Presbyterian and Orthodox Idiosyncrasy of Mind

The Perkins chair institutionalized the widespread concern of southern Presbyterians that the waters of modernity be safely navigated. Though contemporary intellectual currents discomfited some less than others, the displacements of war and Reconstruction would render every reflective southerner's world highly unstable, vividly alerting each that ideas have tangible consequences, and demonstrating the need to discern between the harmful and safe aspects of modernity. Nearly all postbellum Southern Presbyterian ministers claimed to regard the Bible in orthodox fashion and to judge contemporary intellectual, cultural, and social trends by its standard. But as the Woodrow controversy would reveal, one man's orthodoxy could be another's heterodoxy. Not surprisingly, the staunchest conceptions of what it meant to be orthodox came from the voices and pens of the old preacher-apologists who had most explicitly linked southern culture to biblicism. From the sectional debates in the 1850s through the late nineteenth-century defenses of the Lost Cause, Southern Presbyterians like Benjamin Morgan Palmer, John L. Girardeau, and especially Robert Lewis Dabney argued that biblical orthodoxy undergirded southerners’ thought and way of life and that the South, in turn, manifested and safeguarded the authority of scripture.¹

Forged in the fires of sectionalism in the 1850s and honed to an even keener edge in numerous intellectual and cultural engagements through the 1880s, a sharp defense of southern conservatism claiming the very word of God as its basis flashed outward from Dabney's professorial chair at Union Theological Seminary in Hampden-Sidney, Virginia.² Repulsing invaders like the Confederate martyr Stonewall Jackson, whom Dabney served as chaplain and whose memory he served as hagiographer, this southern-biblicist apologia defended the South against social, cultural, and intellectual intruders who threatened to make human reason, rather than divine revelation, the cornerstone of civilization. Though other Southern Presbyterian theologians took a similar tack, Dabney perfected an apologia that identified biblical orthodoxy as the basis of southern culture. In doing so, he engaged such diverse concerns as naturalistic science, racial amalgamation, commercialism, the extension of democracy, women's rights, the public school movement, philosophical empiricism, higher criticism of the Bible, and the proposed union with the Northern Presbyterian Church (PCUSA).³

According to Dabney and those for whom he spoke, these hazardous aspects of modernity emanated from a common source: the abandonment of the Bible as the infallible standard for all thought and conduct. Through the trials of sectionalism and war, Dabney believed, only the South had remained faithful to God. As each year brought new threats, including the seditious cry for a New South and a deadly flirtation with dangerous new ideas, the apologetic role of the theologian grew more crucial. As one entrusted with the cultivation of future ministers—who would in turn influence whole congregations and southern society—Dabney viewed his profession with solemnity. Sound theological training, he would remind his fellow divines in 1883, cultivated skill in detecting error and sophism in false doctrines and inculcated the Presbyterian and orthodox idiosyncrasy of mind.⁴

The kind of orthodoxy Dabney had in mind involved a correct conception of the Bible and its hermeneutics, which had been the common heritage of most mid-nineteenth-century American believers, not just Southern Presbyterians. Outside of Unitarian New England—the chief American conduit for German higher criticism—most mid-nineteenth-century northern theologians joined southerners in rejecting the alien notion that the Bible merely contained the word of God, along with the fallible words of men. Instead, the orthodox position held that the Bible was the word of God, and therefore wholly without errors.⁵ This orthodoxy required that one not only affirm the Bible's infallibility as the word of God but also interpret it properly. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the dominant hermeneutic among Americans north and south was what Mark Noll has called literal Reformed biblicism.⁶ Owing to both Reformed theological traditions and the shared experience of American history that favored commonsense readings of scripture,⁷ most northern and southern Christians believed the meanings of biblical texts were constant across time and space. But, as Noll notes, the debate over slavery and the American Civil War put this nonperspectival conception of biblical truth to a stern test. It would also convince leading southern Presbyterian theologians that northerners—Presbyterians included—could not be trusted to hold the orthodox line.

So one of the earliest errors and sophisms in false doctrines (to use Dabney's phrase) to shape the southern-biblicist apologia questioned the seemingly self-evident biblical basis of slavery. As abolitionists increasingly challenged the morality and Christianity of southern slaveholders in the 1850s, southern Presbyterian theologians countered by pronouncing abolitionism a heretical departure from the plain sense of scripture. In an 1851 letter to his brother, Dabney argued that southern politicians should not neglect the religious element in trying to sway public opinion regarding the justice and morality of slavery: We must go before the nation with the Bible as the text, and ‘Thus saith the Lord’ as the answer . . . because we know that on the Bible argument the abolition party will be driven to unveil their true infidel tendencies. The Bible being bound to stand on our side, they will have to come out and array themselves against the Bible.⁸

If abolitionism amounted to infidelity, more conservative forms of antislavery thought were construed as unhealthy compromises between God's word and human reason. George D. Armstrong—a Norfolk preacher and future science professor at Washington and Lee College—maintained this position in his proslavery works, such as The Christian Doctrine of Slavery (1857). In a written debate with the northern Old School Presbyterian C. Van Rensselaer, Armstrong objected to the former's taxonomy of the various views on slavery and the Bible. Believing the Bible sanctioned only some forms of slavery and in certain historical contexts, Van Rensselaer classified himself as a conservative—opposed to both the abolitionist, who believed slavery was always wrong, and the pro-slavery man, who thought slavery was universally sanctioned by scripture. Armstrong, convinced the scriptures plainly authorized slavery, believed the different conclusions simply reflected whether one followed scripture or human reason. Responding to Van Rensselaer's classification, Armstrong wrote: "Were I to designate the three parties, with an eye to the true nature and origin of their creeds, I should call them the Philosophical—using the word philosophy in the sense of what Paul designates as ‘science falsely so called’ (1 Tim. 6:20), the Philosophico-Scriptural and the Scriptural."⁹

Addressing the history of antislavery opinions, Armstrong averred that, though slavery had waxed and waned in Christian nations due to the operation of worldly causes, no one had deemed it a violation of true religion or morality until the late eighteenth century. This change had come not from within the church or from more thorough study of the Bible, but from that infidel philosophy on the subjects of civil government and human liberty that had culminated in the French Revolution. This science, falsely so called, substituted for the Bible account of the origin of the civil government in the family, the theory of the ‘civil compact’ . . . and confounds human liberty with unbridled license. Outside the South popular expositions of scripture increasingly mingled this heresy with the truths of God's word, and Armstrong believed it the faithful preacher's responsibility to warn against this encroachment of rationalism upon the sanctity of revelation.¹⁰

In New Orleans, Benjamin M. Palmer—the leading Presbyterian of the Old Southwest—declared it the South's providential trust to perpetuate the institution of slavery. In his Thanksgiving Sermon of 1860, delivered to a throng dizzied by the anticipation of war, Palmer said: In this great struggle, we defend the cause of God and religion. Arrayed against the southern defenders of biblical truth was nothing less than a modern incarnation of the atheistic spirit of the French Revolution. The demon which erected its throne upon the guillotine in the days of Robespierre, he warned, yet survives to work other horrors, of which the French Revolution is but the type. Rejecting the social order prescribed by the Bible and divine providence, northern cries for liberty, equality, and fraternity really meant bondage, confiscation, and massacre. Palmer reminded his audience of their divine calling: To the South the high position is assigned of defending, before all nations, the cause of all religion and of all truth.¹¹ Palmer, Armstrong, and Dabney spoke for many others when they linked antislavery to scriptural infidelity and slavery to southern faithfulness to God's word.

In 1859 Dabney assailed the Atlantic Monthly, arguing that the seat of abolitionism, New England, was also the American locus of theological liberalism, and that the list of monstrous isms spawned by its unorthodox view of the inspiration of scripture included not only abolitionism but various forms of political radicalism. This article adumbrated the basic lineaments of the southern-biblicist apologia. In the Liberal Christianity espoused by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Oliver Wendell Holmes in the August issue of Atlantic Monthly, that boastful but shallow periodical, Dabney detected a sneer at the orthodox view of Revelation. Moreover, Holmes not only insinuated that the inspiration of prophets and apostles did not differ in kind . . . from the faculty of reason in all other sane men, but he also called for an Americanizing of religion that would emulate the democratization of American politics, rendering every man his own authority on what and who was inspired.¹² As strong adherents to the traditional Protestant doctrine of the perspicuity of scripture, southern Presbyterians had generally welcomed the commonsense hermeneutical implications of democratization. If—as in Holmes's hands—the democratic impulse meant every man was free to determine whether specific biblical texts were divinely inspired, however, Dabney saw yet another alarming aspect of modernity. Dabney registered three objections against the Autocrat's pronunciamento. These three protests foreshadowed the full-fledged southern-biblicist apologia that would emerge among the most conservative Southern Presbyterians in the postbellum decades. Regarding his protest against Holmes's disparagement of traditional conceptions of inspiration, Dabney allowed the mere expose of such a position to suffice, for he knew his readers would consider such views self-evidently heretical.

In addition to his comments about the nature and authority of scripture, Dabney identified a second component of the developing defense: the connection of biblical fidelity to place. In particular, he resented Holmes's presumption that New England might speak for all America: We would also suggest a little fact, of which he and his kind seem to have been for a long time nearly oblivious, Dabney wrote, that New England is not America and that still less is its capital—the Modern Athens of America! Moreover, Dabney reminded Bostonians that such an approach to the Bible did not originate in America, much less in New England, and so it made no sense to call it an Americanizing of religion. No doubt referring to the higher criticism of the Bible that had such currency among New England Unitarians, Dabney said, It is a heresy to the paternity of which the Modern Athens, fruitful mother as she is of such progeny, has no claim. Germany hatched it . . . Morell and Carlyle introduced it favorable to England, and it was only at third hand that Messrs. Emerson, Parker, and Holmes borrowed it, when partly worn out across the water.¹³ Soon Dabney would shrink the realm of the faithful from America to the South and publicly doubt the fidelity not only of New England but the whole North, including his former brethren in the Presbyterian Church.

Finally, Dabney dissented from the modern intellectual and sociocultural fallacies that, he believed, flowed from the heterodox views of the Bible increasingly common outside the American South. Prickling at Holmes's assumption that Americanizing . . . means that a man shall have a vote because he is a man, Dabney responded: America does not hold as the Autocrat does . . . that every man has a right to vote because he is a man. America regards this as a piece of radicalism, which would introduce female suffrage and Negro suffrage.¹⁴ There would be many other pieces of radicalism. As the nineteenth century progressed, Dabney and his ilk would attribute a host of other isms to the unsound views of biblical inspiration that proliferated outside the South. They would include not only contemporary political, social, and economic proposals, but also many of modernity's most prominent intellectual trends.

For all their fulminations against so much in the thought and culture of their times, as Eugene Genovese has shown, antebellum southern theologians—perhaps especially Southern Presbyterians—were neither premodern nor feudal. Indeed, they believed strict adherence to biblical orthodoxy was the last, best hope for maintaining a Christian society that could enjoy all the blessings of modernity without being destroyed by its curses. While they could appropriate the best of Manchesterian political economy, for instance, they repeatedly warned against the more radical Enlightenment, such as the horrors of the French Revolution and, in America, radical democracy and antislavery.¹⁵

Though Genovese insightfully notes the importance of biblical orthodoxy in southern theologians’ handling of modernity before and during the Civil War, he minimizes its significance after the war. Indeed, he argues that the South's defeat and assimilation into the larger transatlantic capitalist culture precipitated a retreat from orthodoxy in the postbellum decades.¹⁶ There can be little doubt that between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century theological orthodoxy declined, or was diluted, in the South, much as it was throughout the transatlantic Protestant world. Such a telescopic view, however, not only obscures the details of how southern theology changed between 1865 to 1900, but in doing so it masks the many theological options and strategies available to those involved, thereby conveying a sense of historical inevitability.

Moreover, the war did not destroy southern orthodoxy; it augmented the already developing southern-biblicist apologetic and, at least for a while, intensified orthodoxy. Late into the nineteenth century many prominent Southern Presbyterian theologians still upheld biblical orthodoxy as the key to the survival of southern principles. They believed these principles were eternally true and still manifest in the best aspects of southern culture despite the demise of the southern nation. Dabney, Palmer, Girardeau, George Armstrong, and other Southern Presbyterian theologians went to their graves in the years around the turn of the century as both orthodox theologians and unreconstructed southerners.

Genovese dismisses southern postwar heresy trials—presumably including the Woodrow case—as rhetorically fierce rear-guard action that long disguised the extent and depth of their retreat from orthodoxy.¹⁷ In fact, the Southern Presbyterian evolution trial of the 1880s—a contest in which both sides claimed to be the true exemplars of fidelity to Southern Presbyterianism—involved far more than rhetoric. Indeed, it displayed the extent and depth to which orthodoxy had permeated southern theological soil. To be sure, an element within Southern Presbyterianism gradually tired of the dogmatizing and heresy hunting required to maintain the southern-biblicist apologetic, and this fatigue ultimately weakened Southern Presbyterian orthodoxy. But the eventual shift away from theological orthodoxy in mainline Protestant denominations was at least as much an American (or transatlantic) phenomenon as it was a southern one.

The larger question for the cultural and intellectual history of the late nineteenth-century South is why the first extended evolution controversy occurred there and not among the Protestants of the North, the West, or Great Britain. A related question involves the internecine quality of the controversy. Unlike the Scopes Trial and late twentieth-century legislative battles in which the monoliths of fundamentalist biblicism and modern scientism would make mutually exclusive claims on truth, the Woodrow controversy pitted two ostensibly orthodox parties against each other. Compared to contemporary Protestants outside the South, both sides qualified as highly conservative. Both affirmed the inerrancy of scripture. Both deeply believed in the harmony of reason and revelation, science and scripture. Both thought themselves involved in a grand defense of biblical authority against rationalism, against modernity gone awry. The very fact that either side could sensibly level the charge of heresy testifies to the heightened sense of vigilance over protecting southern orthodoxy. The sources of this vigilance lay in both their theological ancestry and the historical experience of sectionalism, war, and Reconstruction.

The Pillar and Ground of the Truth or Nothing: The Formation and Self-Image of the Southern Presbyterian Church

The Southern Presbyterian evolution controversy—indeed, the very existence of a professorial chair dedicated to defending the harmony of science and revealed religion—developed as an outgrowth of Southern Presbyterian ministers’ image of themselves (both as a denomination and as ministers serving that denomination). Southern Presbyterians saw their church as a community of the embattled but faithful few, and they defined faithfulness largely in terms of doctrinal soundness. Staunch Calvinists all, they began the theological exercise with the seminal Calvinist doctrine: the sovereignty of God. As sovereign over his created universe, God had left evidence of his divine handiwork throughout nature. True science therefore found the providence, rationality, and immutable order self-evident in scientific data. True religion expressed human submission to God's sovereignty according to the revelation of scripture as stipulated by the Westminster standards. The Southern Presbyterian God was a God of proper thought more than a God of proper feeling. Doctrine lies at the foundation of everything pertaining to the church, wrote John L. Girardeau. In an 1892 sermon this erstwhile nemesis of James Woodrow lamented what he perceived to be a growing distaste for doctrinal preaching, virtually identifying this distaste with a rejection of the sovereignty of God: "A common outcry is raised against doctrinal preaching . . . a clamor . . . is