Machen's Hope: The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton

By Richard E. Burnett and Mark A. Noll

The first critical biography of J. Gresham Machen, examining the full arc of his intellectual career

J. Gresham Machen is known as a conservative hero of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. But was he always so staunchly antimodernist?   

In this sweeping new biography, Richard E. Burnett examines the whole of Machen’s life and career—from his early years at Princeton, to his experience in the First World War, to his founding of Westminster Theological Seminary . Burnett pays special attention to topics that have received little attention from biographers, like Machen’s crisis of faith and his support for historical criticism of Scripture. 

Incorporating all of Machen’s major works as well as his previously unpublished private correspondence, Burnett crafts a nuanced narrative of Machen’s intellectual journey from enthusiastic modernist to stalwart conservative. Nuanced and thorough, Machen’s Hope will challenge scholars’ assumptions about Machen and his dynamic era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781467467940

Richard E. Burnett

  Richard E. Burnett is executive director and managing editor of Theology Matters. He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) and was formerly professor of systematic theology at Erskine Theological Seminary. His previous books include Karl Barth's Theological Exegesis: The Hermeneutical Principles of the Römerbrief Period.

Book preview

Introduction

THIS STUDY EXAMINES ONE OF AMERICA’S MOST influential Christian thinkers in the twentieth century. Regarded by many as one of mainline Protestantism’s most severe critics, revered by others as one of conservative Protestantism’s most articulate defenders, J. Gresham Machen played a decisive role in shaping the ecclesial landscape of American Protestantism throughout the twentieth century.

This past year was the centennial anniversary of his most popular book, Christianity and Liberalism (1923). No book did more to fuel debates between conservative and liberal Protestants in America throughout the twentieth century. Delineating differences between historic Christianity and liberalism, Machen argued: Despite the liberal use of traditional phraseology modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions. The distinctions Machen drew between conservatives and liberals not only ignited the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s but also defined for many the battle lines between conservatives and liberal Protestants for the remainder of the century.¹

The fundamentalist-modernist controversy erupted on the plains of a wide cultural and ecclesial landscape. Many battles were fought among American Protestants on that ground, especially among Presbyterians. In The Broadening Church (1954), Lefferts Loetscher argued that the battles at Princeton Seminary and in the Presbyterian church in the 1920s had their roots in earlier conflicts. He claimed that the broadening of the church began with the reunion of Old and New School Presbyterians in 1869. He also claimed that after a decade and a half of controversies over newer cultural and theological forces, a hiatus was reached in 1903 when the church voted to make slight changes in its confession. The protracted struggle was followed by nearly two decades of comparative calm, from 1904 to 1922. The years between controversies, 1904 to 1922, were somewhat quieter, but were none the less important.² Yet Loetscher did not elaborate why these years were important, and subsequent research indicates they were anything but calm. In fact, Paul Kemeny argues: The first fundamentalist-modernist controversy in Princeton did not take place at Princeton Seminary in the 1920s but rather occurred at Princeton University a decade earlier.³ Suffice it to say, it has taken time for the smoke to clear from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s. Still, no one denies that J. Gresham Machen was at the center of it.

Conservatives tell the fundamentalist-modernist controversy as a story of the loss and betrayal of the heritage of Old Princeton with Machen as its tragic hero, standing in steadfast continuity with this heritage and defending it against the forces of modernism. But there are problems with this story. Biographers acknowledge an earlier period of agonizing heart-searching and disquiet and torturing doubt that prevented Machen from joining Princeton Seminary’s faculty. Yet none explain his crisis of faith or why he remained an instructor (a nonvoting member of the faculty) for so long (from 1906 to 1915).⁴ Nor has Machen’s frivolous attitude and lackadaisical approach to the seminary curriculum as a student been contrasted with his earlier seriousness in his undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins. One biographer concludes, Why Machen failed to appreciate the seminary’s instruction while a student remains a mystery.⁵ But Machen’s letters reveal why he did not appreciate the seminary’s instruction and had reservations about joining the faculty; namely, he did not stand in steadfast continuity with Old Princeton. Rather, from the time he arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1902 and for years thereafter, he was more committed to the ideals of the New Princeton, that is, to modern university ideals, which Woodrow Wilson began to inculcate as Princeton University’s new president in the fall of 1902.

This biography attempts to examine Machen’s life and thought in a wider cultural, ecclesial, political, intellectual, and academic context. It analyzes his upbringing as a Presbyterian in an elite Baltimore family; the birth of his hope in modern university ideals at Johns Hopkins; his studies in Germany; his crisis of faith, vocational struggles, and efforts to live out his modern university ideals at Princeton Seminary; his gradual awakening to problems with these ideals; his efforts to reconcile the ideals of Old Princeton and New Princeton; his experiences as a YMCA volunteer in World War I; his decision to wage war against liberalism; and his battle at Princeton, and its aftermath. What makes this biography different from others is that it focuses more on Machen’s first forty years, 1881–1921, rather than his last fifteen years. But what also makes it different is its thesis.

This book traces Machen’s transformation from a modernist to an antimodernist. Given his reputation as one of the fiercest opponents of modernism of his day, many will find its thesis provocative. Granted, it requires qualification because there are different ways of defining a modernist. For example, in direct response to Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, Shailer Mathews defined the modernist movement and modernists with six distinct aspects:

The Modernist movement is a phase of scientific struggle for freedom in thought and belief.

Modernists are Christians who accept the results of scientific research as data with which to think religiously.

Modernists are Christians who adopt the methods of historical and literary science in the study of the Bible and religion.

The Modernist Christian believes the Christian religion will help men meet social as well as individual needs.

The Modernist is a Christian who believes that the spiritual and moral needs of the world can be met because he is intellectually convinced that Christian attitudes and faiths are consistent with other realities.

Modernists as a class are evangelical Christians. That is, they accept Jesus Christ as the revelation of a Savior God.⁶

There are ways in which Machen could have affirmed and did affirm each of these six distinct aspects. However, there are distinct ways in which he would have insisted on qualifying, if not also negating, each of these and other aspects of the modernist movement. In short, it turns out that the modernist impulse in American Protestantism is more subtle than many have realized.⁷ But if the difference between being simply modern and being a modernist is the difference between using the tools of the modern age and placing hope in them, then Machen remained a modernist for many years, ironically, and contrary to all his interpreters until now.

This book tells the story of the birth, life, crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Machen’s hope. It is a story that yields important information about how many American churchmen, scholars, and educators understood the relationship between history and faith, religion and science, philosophy and theology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also offers new insight into Presbyterianism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the decline of Old Princeton and the rise of New Princeton; the emergence of religious studies programs in the United States, specifically, at Princeton University; and the relationship between Princeton Seminary and Princeton University, which, given that the former’s close bond with the College of New Jersey was sustained for most of its first century, as Mark Noll observes, has been the subject of surprisingly little attention.⁸

More surprising, however, has been how little attention Machen’s crisis of faith or period of agonizing heart-searching and disquiet and torturing doubt has received compared to other aspects of his life. All his major biographers mention this period. All agree it was more than a brief, superficial phase. All claim his doubts in this period were eventually resolved.⁹ But none examine this period in detail, define the precise nature of his doubts, or describe specifically how they were resolved. Though unsurpassed in the overall details his biography provides, Ned Stonehouse summarizes that Machen’s crisis of faith left him in doubt about his vocation and shows that at times he had been shaken by profound doubts as to the truth of Christianity and that his journey at times seemed to be as much backward as forward.¹⁰ Despite the absence of a well-defined turning point, D. G. Hart summarizes, the intellectual challenges of New Testament Criticism gradually resolved Machen’s doubts about both his faith and the choice of his career.¹¹ But these and other studies shed little light on the path of Machen’s journey through this period or the various turns and signposts along the way.

More recently, Terry Chrishope has focused on Machen’s early intellectual pilgrimage, especially with regard to the development of his views concerning the Bible and historical scholarship. He affirms that scholarship has tended to pass lightly over the early period of his life and that there has appeared no comprehensive treatment of Machen’s writings or intellectual development during these years. He also sees that the main issue for Machen in this period was the rise of historical consciousness or historicism and its bearing on the historical criticism to which the Bible was being subjected in his day. But important as his focus is, Chrishope’s study does not provide extensive analysis of Machen’s wider context, the influence of German biblical and theological scholarship, the history-of-religions school, the ethos of modern universities such as Johns Hopkins, the internal and external battles at Princeton University and Princeton Seminary, etc. His study aims to point out the lines of continuity between Machen’s early intellectual development and the work of his mature years. Yet lines of discontinuity remain unexplored, and Chrishope concludes that after a long period of struggle and hard intellectual work, Machen’s doubts were finally resolved and he came to a sure faith. The lesson—as the title of his book, Toward a Sure Faith, suggests—seems to be that if readers of the Bible examine the evidence and think hard enough about it, as Machen did, they too can come to a sure faith. This interpretation of Machen’s story, however, overlooks many facts and misses other lessons that might be drawn from them.¹²

This biography provides a thicker description of Machen’s intellectual context than previous biographies. It also traces his development in light of more extensive analysis of his private correspondence. It was his custom from his early student days at Princeton Seminary until his later adult years to write letters to his family, usually his mother, on Sunday afternoons. These letters constitute an enormous corpus and yield important insight into Machen’s intellectual and spiritual development. Though there is no good reason to weigh them heavier than his published writings—and good reason to weigh much of their content more lightly—Machen’s letters contain invaluable information for understanding his thought. Moreover, there is evidence he preserved them for this very purpose. Barry Waugh, editor of Letters from the Front: J. Gresham Machen’s Correspondence from World War I, claims: Dr. Machen meticulously collected his own correspondence for posterity; Machen may even have published his own correspondence if he had been providentially granted a longer life. With respect to the war letters, the editor believes that due to the encouragement of his family regarding the letters it is almost certain that he wanted them published.¹³ The clearest indication that Machen wished to preserve his letters for posterity is that on several occasions he asked his mother to edit them. Such requests occurred before, during, and after the war.¹⁴

In tracing the trajectory of Machen’s thought, this study touches on many aspects of his personal life and relationships. Those looking for psychological explanations or analysis of his personality, however, will be disappointed, for no attempt has been made to provide it. This is not to say, of course, that psychological or personality factors do not play a role and are not worth considering, but simply that such are not the focus of this study.¹⁵ This is an intellectual, not a psychological, biography. The focus is not on Machen’s inner life, motives, or intentions, but on his thoughts, words, and deeds. Serious attention to the latter, for reasons that will hopefully be made clear, seems well deserved and long overdue.

1. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 7.

2. Loetscher, The Broadening Church, 94–95.

3. Kemeny, Princeton in the Nation’s Service, 180.

4. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, 17, 190.

5. Hart, Defending the Faith, 25–26.

6. Mathews, The Faith of Modernism, 23–34.

7. See, for example, Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse. Hutchinson argues: When ‘modernism’ finally became a common term in the early part of this century, it generally meant three things: first, and most visibly, it meant the conscious, intended adaptation of religious ideas to modern culture … the idea that God is immanent in human cultural development and revealed through it. The other was a belief that human society is moving toward realization (even though it may never attain the reality) of the Kingdom of God (2). Hutchinson also associates modernism with progressive idealism, religiously based progressivism (2), and humanistic optimism (9).

8. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 266.

9. Bradley Longfield refers to Machen’s crisis of faith being ultimately resolved and quietly resolved. Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, 5, 43. Marsden refers to it being thoroughly resolved in J. Gresham Machen, History and Faith, 160. Hart refers to it being gradually resolved in Defending the Faith, 24.

10. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, 197.

11. Hart, Defending the Faith, 24, 27.

12. Chrishope, Toward a Sure Faith, 11–13, 130, 186.

13. Waugh, Letters from the Front, 315.

14. E.g., You have already reviewed (before the arrival of the present letter), I hope, my little note apologizing for my criticism of Dr. Stevenson in two or three previous letters. Really, my dearest Mother, I should be exceedingly grateful if you would find those letters, and cut out the offending parts, or at least put right with them a reference to my note of apology. I have been exceedingly unjust, and Dr. Stevenson’s present kindness makes me feel exceedingly mean. JGM to MGM, Jan. 12, 1919. By the way, will you please destroy my letter or the part of my letter where I spoke of ‘loss of social position.’ I shall feel greatly relieved if I know that that is no longer preserved, since it was foolishly expressed. I shall not try to tell you what I meant. It was probably silly, though there is a modicum of truth in it, more than you probably realize. JGM to MGM, Sept. 19, 1917. Mrs. Machen followed through on these requests (leaving scissors-expurgated lacunae in some of these letters), but sometimes she apparently did not.

15. For discussions of Machen’s personality, see Coray, J. Gresham Machen, passim; Hart, Defending the Faith, 109–10; Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 200–201; Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, 498–99; Wooley, The Significance of J. Gresham Machen, passim. Stephen J. Nichols observes that already in the 1920s an effort was made to turn the controversy on issues of personality and not on issues of doctrine. Stephen J. Nichols, J. Gresham Machen, 57.

ONE

The Early Life of J. Gresham Machen

JOHN GRESHAM MACHEN WAS BORN ON JULY 28, 1881, in Baltimore, Maryland. The second of three sons in a prominent, upper-class family, he was raised by two well-educated, highly cultured parents who cared deeply about the Christian faith and the finer things of life, and it would appear, rather consistently, in that order. His parents—as well as his grandparents and most of his extended family—were Southerners and are said to have been passionately committed to their Old School Presbyterian heritage and their Southern culture. Much has been made of his upbringing as a Southerner and an Old School Presbyterian. Apart from his privileged upbringing, biographers have highlighted these two features of his background more than all others. Indeed, these are said to account for some of his most important later views and actions. For example, some attribute his leaving Princeton Seminary to form Westminster Seminary in 1929 and the Presbyterian Church USA to form the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1935 to his secessionist, Southern mind; his allegiance to the Legacy of the Lost Cause; or his loyalty to the Southern cult of chivalry; etc. Stonehouse refers to his passionately-held Southern perspectives and sympathies. Bradley Longfield provides the most accurate summary: Scion of Southern parents, raised in the most affluent Southern city of his day, surrounded by Southern culture and weaned on Southern Presbyterian orthodoxy, J. Gresham Machen was destined to reflect Southern cultural, political, and theological ideals all his life.¹

There is no question that being born and raised a Southerner and a Presbyterian influenced Machen. Neither is there any doubt that he was grateful for his cultural and ecclesial heritage. But as much as his cultural and ecclesial heritage shaped him, it does not provide a sufficient basis for understanding his early or later adulthood. Nor does his upbringing as a Southerner and a Presbyterian account for many of his most notable thoughts, views, and actions. Indeed, the thoughts, views, and actions of many Southerners and Presbyterians in his day are more complicated than many of his interpreters have assumed, and so was his and his family’s relationship to their cultural and ecclesial heritage.

FAMILY

Machen’s father, Arthur Webster Machen (1827–1915), was born in Virginia and grew up on Maryland Avenue, Washington, DC, where his father, Lewis H. Machen (1790–1863), served for forty-nine years as a clerk in the office of the US secretary of state. Lewis hoped to become a lawyer but never received formal education. He became instead a lifelong learner; a self-taught student of law and the humanities; a reader of Latin, French, and Spanish; an avid book collector who was dedicated to educating his three children.² An outspoken advocate of female education, Lewis sent his daughter, Emmeline (1817–1887), to Greenfield School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts, where she studied Latin, algebra, geometry, music, art, chemistry, botany, philosophy, and logic. From her father she also learned French. Lewis’s youngest son, James (1831–1913), was likewise afforded fine educational opportunities. Yet, according to his sister, James preferred physical to mental exertion and aspired to be a gentleman farmer, but, partly owing to extravagant tastes, was never successful. Lewis’s oldest son, Arthur, also attended private academies and received a classical education. He entered Columbian College (later named George Washington University) in 1842, but when Lewis bought a farm in Fairfax County, Virginia, and moved his family there in 1843, Arthur—guided by his father, who supplied him with all the books he needed—embarked upon a rigorous course of private study that focused on classical literature with an emphasis on logic, philosophy, rhetoric, and history. He also worked on the farm alongside his brother, James, but his goal was to prepare himself for a career in law or perhaps, according to his father’s ambition, politics. This goal began to be realized when Arthur entered Harvard Law School in 1849.³

Arthur proved to be an excellent student. Invigorated by the study of law, he attended lectures, participated in moot courts and debate societies, developed skills, and learned the intricacies and specialized fields of law. Working in the library, he found time to read broadly, especially works of antiquity. He graduated with high honors. His thesis, The Rights and Liabilities of Railroad Companies, was considered the best of his 1851 class. Asked by Professor Theophilus Parsons to assist him in writing a book on contract law, he stayed in Cambridge another year, expanded his knowledge of business law, and earned the respect of his superiors and peers. He then moved to Baltimore because, he said, a great town is the place for a lawyer—especially in these times when commercial business so engrosses the courts. Establishing his legal practice took great time and effort, but eventually he and his partner, Harvard classmate Richard Gittings, gained a solid reputation. By 1859, after winning two high-profile cases, they had built a successful practice. Throughout his life, Arthur regularly corresponded with his father, Lewis. Their letters reflect mutual affection and encouragement as well as fatherly admonition and filial gratitude. They are also replete with literary and historical references and address many topics, including philosophy and theology.⁴

According to his grandson Arthur Jr., Lewis’s life was animated and guided by a tenacious Christian faith. Educated as an Episcopalian, he joined the Presbyterian Church in early manhood, largely because he believed the presbyterian form of church government to be more in harmony than episcopacy with our republican institutions. Ordained a ruling elder at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington in the mid-1830s, he resigned after the Old School–New School division of 1837/1838. When it became clear that the session and their newly called pastor were inclined toward the New School, Lewis drafted a resignation letter on October 4, 1839, that he never sent but that stated: It cannot be disguised that the Presbyterian Church is rent into two parties, differing essentially from each other on fundamental points; the one maintaining the Calvinistic doctrine of the Confession of Faith according to their obvious meaning; the other, either denying them altogether, or so explaining them as to make them in effect Arminian or Pelagian. He continued: Twenty years ago I assented to the Doctrines of the Confession of Faith, not without hesitation, but after the best examination in my power, and with a conviction of their conformity with the divine will, revealed in Scripture. I shall adhere, then, to the standards of the Church, and to that division of its members which shall most unequivocally, and consistently, maintain them. The letter acknowledges the difficulty in reconciling the foreknowledge of God, and his absolute control over all events, with that free agency of man which makes him accountable for the moral conduct upon which these events apparently depend, but it ends with an affirmation that God made some of the fallen posterity of Adam vessels of wrath, and others vessels of mercy. Lewis never joined a Presbyterian communion thereafter. His grandson claims that despite his preference, he reverted to the Episcopal Church and became a staunch supporter and vestryman of the Protestant Episcopal Church.⁵

Arthur also attended Episcopal and Presbyterian churches as a young man, and at Harvard, a hot-bed of Unitarianism, he avoided any of the damnable heresies in religion with which the vicinity of Boston doth so greatly abound. He even wrote his brother, James, warning him against the preaching of Theodore Parker, an infidel whose head glows with all the fiery zeal of a fanatic. Yet Arthur himself struggled with faith for many years, such that while at Harvard his parents repeatedly expressed concern that he had not yet joined a church. Arthur responded that they had neither cause for present fear nor for future doubt; he was not conscious of living any worse than when at home, nor did he entertain speculative doubts, and he had sought with sincerity and seriousness to acquire as clear an understanding as [he could] of that system of revealed truth. Yet he admitted that he did not yet have an active faith and asked, It is not difficult to utter the formula—to say I believe in Christ; but do I believe in that sense which is required by the Searcher of Hearts?⁶ Many such letters were exchanged over the next years. Even after his temporal affairs became more settled, his mother, Caroline (1789–1878), a pious Congregationalist from New England, continued to express concern over his spiritual state.⁷ His siblings James and Emmeline, stirred by local revivals, also wrote to encourage him to make a public profession of faith.⁸ Throughout this period Arthur regularly attended worship services. He briefly attended Central Presbyterian Church, where he heard sermons by Stuart Robinson, whom he held in high esteem. He also continued to read books of theological import, including German biblical critics before their approach was known as higher, which he discussed with his father:

Lately I have been looking into what some of the sounder German theological critics have been doing. And while there is much in their writings which to our Anglo-Saxon apprehension is cloudy and mystic, there is much, especially in the department of textual and historical criticism which is very valuable. I confess I sympathise, too, with them in the cardinal point for which they contend, the release, namely, of our minds from the letters of theological forms and formulae, the inventions of a day far from the brightest in ecclesiastical history, and the consequent free access to the very Scriptures as the sole guide of our lives, and a foundation of truth needing no abutments and props of human device or building. For my own part, I cannot but deem it even more derogatory to God than to the reason with which he has gifted us, to imagine that the Truth of History or the Truth of Science can be dangerous to the Truth of Revelation. Free inquiry, provided always it be pursued in reverent spirit, is our vocation as rational being, and therefore, it is safe to believe, must lead in the end to good, not evil—though that good may by the narrow minded formalist be evil spoken of.⁹

Arthur’s sympathy for the cardinal point of German critics, the release, namely, of our minds from the letters of theological forms and formulae for free access to the Scriptures, was a conviction he passed on to his son Gresham. Deeper still was his conviction that free inquiry … must lead in the end to good, not evil—though that good may by the narrow minded formalist be evil spoken of. The peace or truce Arthur affirmed between the Truth of History or the Truth of Science and the Truth of Revelation had become commonplace since Schleiermacher’s declaration of an eternal covenant between the living Christian faith, and completely free, independent, scientific inquiry, so that faith does not hinder science and science does not exclude faith. But the distinction between these two sets of truths was older and had become commonplace since Lessing posited his ugly ditch between the accidental truths of history and necessary truths of reason.¹⁰ Assuming these two sets of truths, however, required a kind of double-entry bookkeeping that kept men like Arthur busy trying to balance the books.¹¹ He read Darwin, Huxley, and other skeptics; was curious about the latest findings of modern historians and natural scientists; and kept abreast of debates between religion and science. He also read the works of Jeremy Taylor and biographies of John Wesley and George Whitefield, whose lives he admired. He compared Luther’s translation of the Psalms to his English Bible, favoring the former for its "poetical verisimilitude. He also developed the habit of reading a portion of the Greek New Testament before going to bed, a custom he kept down to the very day of his death, according to his eldest son. He would probably have been greatly amused if anyone had called him a ‘scholar’; yet his knowledge of Latin and Greek and English and French literature, his middle son said, would put our professional scholars to shame."¹²

Arthur eventually joined his law partner at Christ Episcopal Church, Baltimore, where he attended regularly from the mid-1850s until 1873. But he remained busy building a practice that was growing by leaps and bounds throughout these years and regretted not having more time to devote to spiritual matters.¹³ With professional and financial success came increased familial responsibility. After his family’s farm in Fairfax County was repeatedly ravaged by war, Arthur felt obliged in November 1862 to move his parents and sister out of danger to be with him in Baltimore. He secured a pew for his sister and mother at the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, where they eventually joined. According to one analyst, Although Arthur’s law practice was doing well, the burden both emotionally and financially of his family, totally dependent upon him for everything, was a great strain. But he persevered and emerged after the war one of Baltimore’s most respected attorneys and conscientious citizens. It was in the spring of 1870, at the home of Mrs. Edgeworth Bird, another self-exiled Southerner and member of the Franklin Street Church, that he met her niece, Mary Gresham of Macon, Georgia.¹⁴

Mary Jones Gresham (1849–1931), or Minnie, as her friends called her, was the daughter of Mary Eliza Baxter (1822–1870) and John Jones Gresham (1812–1891). Privately educated in his youth, John graduated from Franklin College (later reorganized as the University of Georgia) with high honors in 1833. After a brief apprenticeship, he was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1834. Politically active, he was the mayor of Macon in 1843 and 1847, served two terms in the State House of Representatives, and was elected to the Georgia State Senate in 1865.¹⁵ Because Macon was the most important interior city in the South and John’s father, Job, was a pioneer in the cotton industry, John both inherited and earned a fortune. He was director of the Southwestern and Central Railroads and Central Bank of Georgia, president and founder of the Macon Manufacturing Company, a generous benefactor of education on the state and local level, and chairman of the board of the University of Georgia and trustee and treasurer of Oglethorpe College and Columbia Theological Seminary.¹⁶ By 1860, he owned ten thousand acres, two plantations, hundreds of slaves, and a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion in downtown Macon. Renowned for his generosity in supporting the war effort, he fiercely defended states’ rights and slavery and is described as a classic Southern patriarch and typical man of the planter class, who had no moral qualms about buying slaves and was not above disciplining them himself with a strap.¹⁷ He grew up a Baptist, as did his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, but joined First Presbyterian Church, Athens, Georgia, while in college. It was in the same membership class that he met Mary, a descendant of Scots-Irish Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists. Mary and her sister attained about as much education as women could at the time and were tutored by Benjamin Morgan Palmer while he studied at the University of Georgia and lived in their home, before he became one of the South’s greatest preachers and most prominent leaders. Mary and John Gresham married in 1843 and raised three children. He became a ruling elder in the First Presbyterian Church of Macon in 1847. The Greshams were regarded as devout people who taught their children to trust in Christ alone for their salvation and to—in the language of popular revivalist piety—only give your heart to the Saviour, and submit to him in all things.¹⁸

It was Minnie at age ten who elicited these words from her father while he was in Indianapolis serving as a delegate to the 1859 General Assembly of the Presbyterian church. The two were close, and she wrote to him, asking about how she could become a Christian. He responded that as much as he had thought of doing so sooner, discussing such matters so explicitly was not easy. Minnie was a precocious, gifted, and inquisitive child with an insatiable thirst for learning. Having attended the best private schools, she entered at age fourteen Wesleyan Female College, which was in Macon and affiliated with the Methodist church. No mere finishing school for the cultural refinement of daughters of the planter class, it championed some of the most egalitarian views on the education of women in the country and offered Minnie rigorous instruction that came as close as the time and culture would allow to an education comparable to a man’s.¹⁹

Minnie studied trigonometry; Latin; French; English literature; botany; astronomy; geology; logic; natural, mental, and moral philosophy; and the Bible. She excelled in her studies, won the faculty’s esteem, and graduated the covaledictorian of her class in 1865. Afterward, she spent time with her great-uncle, Leroy Wiley, in New York, to ‘indulge’ in such things as opera and theater, and sought further knowledge of French and music. She studied a year at the Southern Home School of Miss Kummer in Baltimore and studied afterward independently at home. But as broad as her education was, she felt her theological education was not. She later said it was an environment that discouraged freedom of thought, and, she went on, at age sixteen I rebelled against the trammeling of the intellect. She experienced in these years an intellectual crisis of faith, which she discussed at length with the president of her college, John M. Bonnell, whom she wrote for help. These letters reflect, it is said, a maturing woman still wrestling with questions of existence in the midst of elite southern society and her struggles to make her Christian faith her own.²⁰ But they also reflect questions about the doctrines of election and providence that were common among Southerners after the war, not least among Presbyterians, having been so convinced of the righteousness of their cause and their identity as God’s elect.²¹

Minnie traveled extensively in these years, and on her way to New York, en route to Europe, met Arthur in the home of her aunt Bird. Soon they began to correspond and discovered they had much in common, especially a faith in and for which they had both struggled. Their letters reflect discussions ranging from the origins of the universe to the relationship between religion and science, topics Arthur had reflected on for years. Though nearly half his age, Minnie was nevertheless no passive participant in these discussions.²² She was an aspiring writer and intellectual, who expressed fears that marriage would stifle her studies. Arthur assured her that as wife of a professional she would have more time and freedom of mind for earnest and thoughtful reading than most wives and even himself. In addition to his library and large collection of rare books that he continued to acquire, he promised Minnie that she would have her own place to study, to which she responded: Indeed, though the fancy seems arrogant in a woman, I like the idea of having a ‘study’ myself. The novelists would call a woman’s study a ‘boudoir’! Having found in Minnie a soul mate, Arthur wrote: It is bliss to feel that our minds, our wills, are one—that we think the same thoughts, love the same objects, entertain the same wishes. Engaged in April 1872, they married on February 13, 1873.²³

Forty-five years old when he married, Arthur was still at the start of his legal career. An expert on perpetuity, he eventually argued several cases before the US Supreme Court, some involving international law. Held in highest veneration and respect by his peers, he was one of the nation’s leading attorneys.²⁴ Joining Franklin Street Presbyterian Church after marrying, he became a dedicated churchman and eventually a ruling elder who was esteemed as a man of conspicuous fidelity to his duties; a regular attendant at the service of the sanctuary, a liberal and discriminating supporter of the doctrines, policies, and benevolent enterprises of the Presbyterian Church.²⁵ A devoted husband and father, Arthur provided his family with a very comfortable standard of living, including regular three-month-long summer vacations in New England and extraordinary opportunities to travel and study. And he provided for more than his family’s material welfare. His middle son, who was born when his father was fifty-four, later recalled:

He was a profoundly Christian man, who had read widely and meditated earnestly upon the really great things of our holy faith. His Christian experience was not of the emotional or pietistical type, but was a quiet stream whose waters ran deep. He did not adopt that Touch not, taste not, handle not attitude toward the good things or the wonders of God’s world which too often today causes earnest Christian people to consecrate to God only an impoverished man, but in his case true learning and true piety went hand in hand. Every Sunday morning and Sunday night, and on Wednesday night, he was in his place in church, and a similar faithfulness characterized all his service as an elder in the Presbyterian church.²⁶

Minnie is described as a true antebellum southern belle of the gentleman planter class.²⁷ Born about the same time, place, and social class, her life in some ways resembles the fictional character Scarlett O’Hara. Minnie, however, was no mere rich Southern socialite. While it would be anachronistic to describe them as a power couple, Arthur and Minnie were highly driven, hardworking individuals who had high expectations of themselves and their three sons. In addition to pursuing her intellectual and literary ambitions, she was a gracious hostess, charming conversationalist, diplomatic organizer, and quintessential Southern lady. Active in her church, community, various clubs and societies, she also administered a household staff. Notwithstanding her Victorian values and opposition to women’s suffrage, she was—to the extent she was not against intelligent women accomplishing greatness but supporting it—a modern woman.²⁸ She pursued learning with great zeal, read widely in the Greek and Roman classics and American and English literature; learned to read Greek; wrote essays, articles, and poems; was especially fond of Victorian writers; and eventually published a book on Robert Browning.²⁹ She also devoted herself to educating her sons, passing on her love of learning. She helped with their homework, secured tutors, critiqued their papers (as late as their college years), and exposed them to the cultural riches of Baltimore, taking them to operas, concerts, conservatories, museums, the theater, lectures at Johns Hopkins, etc., most of which were within walking distance of their home. The strength of her commitments and opinions in her letters and diary reflects characteristics of a Southern matriarch or archetypal steel magnolia. But her passion for learning, as she saw it, was an expression of her faith. It is said, Mary was the undisputed spiritual leader in the Machen household.³⁰ In catechizing her sons, she inculcated what was most important to her and left an indelible mark on them. Her life and witness decisively shaped Gresham, who paid this tribute shortly after her death:

Even stronger was the influence of my mother. Like my father, she was an exceedingly wide reader; her book on The Bible in Browning is only one gleaning from a very rich field. … She loved poetry with a deep and discriminating love, but she loved with equal ardor the wonders and beauties of nature. … She was a student of botany and also a student of the stars in their courses. … She loved nature in its more majestic aspects, and she also loved the infinite sweetness of the woods and fields. I suppose it is from her that I learned to escape sometimes from the heartless machinery of the world, and the equally heartless machinery, alas, of a church organization nominally dedicated to Christ, and refresh my soul with the friendliness of the hills. But beneath my mother’s love of nature and beneath her love of poetry that was inextricably intertwined with that other love, there lay her profound reverence for the author of all beauty and all truth. To her God was all and in all, and her access to God she found only through the new and living way that the Scriptures point out.³¹

All three Machen sons were privately educated, attended graduate school, published significant books and articles in their fields, and had successful careers. Arthur Jr. went to Harvard Law School and joined his father’s law firm; Tom went to school at Cornell and, later, traveled to Paris and became an architect; and Gresham became the most famous of them all. Yet these sons of privilege were more than products of an elite patrician family.

HOME

Machen grew up not merely in the most affluent Southern city of his day, but in one of the most affluent, influential, and cosmopolitan cities in the United States. Vital to the nation’s growth from early on and key to its entry to the industrial age, Baltimore’s harbor was the gateway to America for millions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The city’s population grew so rapidly between 1830 and 1850 that it became the nation’s second-largest city after New York. With large ethnic immigrant groups from all over the world, a thriving Jewish community, and the country’s first Roman Catholic seminary, it was one of the most culturally and religiously diverse cities in America. It was also home of the first offshoot of Boston-type Unitarianism to take root outside the Boston area in 1816, when a series of Harvard graduates began preaching there and established the First Independent Church of Baltimore.³² The most progressive Southern city, it became deeply divided over slavery. The home of the nation’s only exclusively antislavery newspaper, many outspoken abolitionists, and radical abolitionist movements, it was also the home of antiabolitionists. It did not secede from the Union, and its slave population steadily decreased from 1810 to 1860, but Maryland remained a slave state. When troops from Massachusetts marched through it on April 19, 1861, a mob assaulted them, resulting in a riot that killed four soldiers and twelve civilians. Thereafter the city was ruled by martial law. It did not suffer the devastation that many Southern cities did, but having been occupied by federal troops, it was economically drained. The end of the war found the city emotionally exhausted, economically shattered and plagued by the guilt of having the last and most tragic shot of the war fired by one of their own, John Wilkes Booth.³³

Late-nineteenth-century Baltimore, the home of the Machens, one biographer claimed, proved to be a perfect environment for the cultivation of both Southern Presbyterian orthodoxy and the cult of the Lost Cause.³⁴ With the likes of Booth among its citizens, Baltimore was undoubtedly the home of some who held to the cult of the Lost Cause and hoped for a joyful resurrection of the Confederacy.³⁵ But there is no evidence that Machen was raised by these kinds of people, or that he grew up with them. It is true that in addition to being in other clubs and societies, such as the Colonial Dames and the Arundel Club, Minnie was active in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, as were most women in her family.³⁶ The official purpose of this organization, founded in 1894, was to honor the memory of the Confederate dead, preserve a truthful history of the war, aid its survivors, and recognize the important role played by Southern women. Rather than entertaining hopes that the South would rise again, its members were devoted to preserving Southern customs and traditions. For the Machen and Gresham women, participation seemed to be more social, seeing the group as a time to gather with other southerners to remember for what they and their families had fought and suffered, rather than an expression of the quasi-religion of the Lost Cause with its worship of Confederate heroes.³⁷ Still, their gatherings, which sometimes included male members, did involve idealization of Southern culture and efforts to inculcate its values. The Machens and Greshams were undoubtedly proud of their Southern heritage. But being Southern was only part of their identity in a world that was rapidly changing. And it appears precisely because the world was rapidly changing, especially in Baltimore, that they sought to preserve their Southern heritage.

Living in Mount Vernon Place, the most exclusive neighborhood in Baltimore, the Machens were part of an elite social class and were surrounded by some of the brightest, most educated, and influential citizens in America. They were leaders and planners, movers and shakers, not only in Baltimore but in Washington, DC. Their social network included senators, congressmen, governors, university presidents, bankers, academicians, business leaders, etc. Their intimate friends were not all Southerners. But many were, and they saw the Civil War as an unmitigated disaster; especially seeing it as such were members of the Machens’ extended family, such as the Birds and Baxters, whom it financially ruined. The war had devastated the nation, wasted millions of lives, and was a nightmare they wished to forget. The humiliation of Reconstruction was equaled only by the increasingly bitter recognition and shame of exactly what it was the South had allowed to fly under its banner, namely, the horror of slavery. Minnie’s poem Fast Day, written near the end of the war, reflects a sense of culpability and need for pardon on behalf of her people. She asks in one stanza, Why does our God afflict us thus? You’ve wandered from the straight and narrow path / And thus, you have deserved your Maker’s wrath.³⁸ Minnie’s poem does not name slavery as the reason for her people’s need of pardon, but rising consciousness of guilt over it in succeeding decades, not least among educated, upper-class Southerners, is evident even when veiled in chivalrous exculpations.³⁹ Thus, by the time Gresham was born, there were likely some who still whistled Dixie on the streets of Baltimore, but they were not of the same circles or social class as the Machens. Such circles may have harbored secret mourners of the Lost Cause, but there is no evidence the Machens harbored such feelings.⁴⁰ They were certainly nostalgic about many aspects of Southern life, but they were, above all, realists, forward-looking leaders and builders, and among the most influential citizens of Baltimore. Their eyes were set primarily on the future, not the past.

This is not to say there were not parts of their past they felt the need to explain. In a collection of his father’s letters, Arthur Jr. added a lovingly detailed description of his father’s life and career. He also took pains to explain his father’s and grandfather’s views regarding the war and slavery. For several years prior to 1860 my grandfather had looked forward to a civil war, as to an almost unspeakable calamity—a fear not to be put into words. He and his sons considered themselves Union men of the South. Devoted to the Union and almost without pecuniary interest in slavery—he owned no negroes save one or two household servants—and believing that hostilities were brought about by fanatics on the one side and hotheads on the other, he and his son James, who became a soldier in the Confederate Army, were compelled to take sides either against the State which they loved and to which their loyalty was due, or against the Union which they had cherished as the palladium of their liberties.⁴¹ Lewis, his grandson claims, regarded slavery an evil, which, however, was more tolerable than its sudden abolition. He saw it as disappearing from natural causes according to the order of Providence.⁴² Likewise, Arthur Jr. seeks to exculpate his father for positions he took suggesting support for slavery prior to the war.⁴³ Above all, he portrays him as a supremely modest, humane, caring, and independent-minded individual, who defended enslaved and free Black persons before and after the war, and who was fair and open-minded in his judgments regarding their legal rights.⁴⁴

Slavery remained a sore subject and was still, despite all dissemblance and denial, a dark cloud that hovered over many Southern families. Nevertheless, some members of the Machen family continued to support segregationist policies, as did many at the time—some for the sake of their conception of an ordered society, others on biological grounds, as will be discussed.⁴⁵ Yet, this is not to suggest that the Machens had no concern for Black people, especially their household servants, or that genuine affection did not exist in some of these relations.⁴⁶ But whatever their racial views, the Machens’ affection for the South does not appear to have been tied to them. Rather, it appears to have been tied to other cultural views, values, tastes, and sensibilities, especially for Gresham, who expressed his affection for the South in an essay he wrote as a college freshman, An Old Homestead. Relating childhood memories of his grandfather Gresham’s estate, he began:

On College Street, in Macon, Georgia, stands a typical Southern mansion, almost hidden by luxuriant shrubs and tall magnolia trees. The house is built of wood in the colonial style, and is painted white. In front of the house, supporting the roof, stand four tall pillars. These pillars are hollow, and were used during the war to hide the family silver from the Yankees. Behind the pillars, is enclosed a broad piazza, which is transformed by a white climbing rose into a bower of bliss.

To the left, separated from the street by an open fence, is the rose garden. Let New York millionaires spend thousands of dollars on conservatories, they can never produce such roses as here spring up almost on their own accord. Red roses, white roses, pink roses, yellow roses—roses of every conceivable shade—bloom with glorious profusion which only a genial southern sun can give; and underneath the ground is carpeted with heartsease and violets.

Describing the trees, flowers, and gardens on the estate, the author continues: no words can tell the peculiar charm of the place. Perhaps it is the balmy southern air scented with flowers, perhaps the quiet and restfulness of the spot, perhaps the spaciousness of the old home. But more probably it is not to be found chiefly in any of these things. It lies in the ‘folks.’ He states: the servants are the real, old-fashioned kind-hearted Southern darkies, and he provides illustrations. He then claims: Of the Southern people themselves everyone knows the hospitality and the refinement. … Nowhere else can be found the peculiar air of generous hospitality which pervades the whole place. He concludes: The Englishman may tell of the green hedges and well kept lawns of his father’s home in Old England … the New Englander may look back with affection upon his neat plain cottage … but the Southerner will never lose the affectionate remembrance of the dear old home in the midst of the waving magnolia trees and its fragrant roses.⁴⁷

In his description of Southern life, Machen exhibits, among other things, a romantic view of nature that is reflected throughout his life in essays such as The Beauty of the Forest, Mountains and Why We Love Them, The Benefits of Walking, etc.⁴⁸ It was from his mother’s love of nature, he said, to recall, that he too learned to love the infinite sweetness of the woods and fields, the friendliness of the hills, etc. And this love of nature began with memories he associated with being in the South as a boy: I am glad that in my very early youth I visited my grandfather’s home in Macon, Georgia, where my mother was brought up. Its fragrance and its spaciousness and simplicity were typical of a bygone age.⁴⁹ The fact is, however, apart from vacations until age ten, Machen spent little time in the South, at least not the Old South, Deep South, or rural South.⁵⁰ Rather, he grew up in downtown Baltimore in a grand, four-story house built for the city’s wealthiest families. Throughout his youth he witnessed daily modern urbanization on a massive scale: the transition from horse-drawn carriages to motor cars; the introduction of electricity, cable cars, and bustling traffic; the completion of Baltimore’s first skyscraper, the Fidelity Building in 1893, and several more skyscrapers soon thereafter. It was a rapidly growing city that in many ways was as modern and progressive as New York. Given these advances, it should perhaps come as no surprise that members of Machen’s family idealized Southern culture.⁵¹

In short, the claim that Machen idealized Southern culture and was weaned on Southern myths is difficult to deny. As far as allegiance to a Southern cult of chivalry, there may be something to this as well.⁵² When embattled in the mid-1920s, for example, it is noteworthy how often he refers to heroism and, specifically, Christian heroism, which may well derive in part from his own Southern notion of valor. It is also noteworthy that shortly before he launched his famous battle against liberalism, he visited Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Looking over the battlefield, he wondered how the world might have fared if things had turned out differently there. Such fantasizing, however, if Faulkner is correct, was not uncommon in this era but rather that of every Southern boy.⁵³ Still, the extent of Machen’s awareness of his idealization of Southern culture is difficult to measure. In stating, I suppose it is from her that I learned to escape sometimes from the heartless machinery of the world, Machen referred not only to his mother but to the life and culture she had introduced to him; and his reference to an escape suggests that he understood the difference between the ideal and the real, that bygone age and his own.⁵⁴ But as much as he idealized Southern culture and lamented its demise, Machen and his family did not idealize the Southern Presbyterian Church.

CHURCH

According to biographers, Machen grew up in a conservative, staunchly Calvinistic, self-consciously Old School Presbyterian congregation of the Southern Presbyterian Church, and it was the convictions, piety, and ethos of this congregation, they claim, that decisively shaped him. Again, there is no question that Machen was shaped by his ecclesial heritage and, specifically, by the convictions, piety, and ethos of his home church. But just as the Machen family’s relationship to their cultural heritage was more complicated than many have assumed, so was their relationship to their ecclesial heritage, and so was the relationship of the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church to this heritage.⁵⁵

Organized in 1847, the Franklin Street Church was planted by the First Presbyterian Church, an Old School congregation of the Presbyterian Church USA. The split between Old and New School Presbyterians had occurred a decade earlier. What led to it were differences over, on the one hand, a stricter, more traditional, doctrinally precise Calvinism of the Old School that maintained firm belief in predestination, original sin, an Augustinian understanding of human nature, etc., and, on the other hand, a more pragmatic, revivalistic, experientially oriented faith of the New School, which denied or seemed to deny these traditional Calvinistic beliefs.⁵⁶ Yet looming in the background, part of the Old School–New School split in 1838, was the nature of the church and its relation to the state. Specifically, Old School Presbyterians wanted to avoid splitting over slavery⁵⁷ and the political excesses of New School Presbyterians, namely, their radical abolitionist views and progressivist social agenda.⁵⁸ The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church had unanimously declared in 1818: We consider the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race by another as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature, as utterly inconsistent with the law of God … and as totally irreconcilable with the spirit and the principles of the Gospel of Christ.⁵⁹ But as debate over slavery increased in the nation, so it increased in the church. By 1845, the Old School Assembly stated: The Church of Christ is a spiritual body, whose jurisdiction extends only to the religious faith and moral conduct of her members.⁶⁰

For the church to be a spiritual body, according to the South’s leading theologian, James Henley Thornwell (1812–1862), it "has no right to interfere directly with the civil relations of society. Whether Slavery shall be perpetuated or not, … these are questions not for the Church but the State, not for Ministers but statesmen. Christian men may discuss them as citizens and patriots, but not as members of the Church of Jesus Christ. As it is clear from the Bible that Slavery is not a sin, the Church, as such, has no more right to seek its extinction than to seek a change in the political structure of a nation."⁶¹ Thornwell later argued that the church and the state were two distinct commonwealths as separate as planets moving in different orbits, and unless each is confined to its own tract, the consequences may be as disastrous in the moral world as the collision of different spheres in the world of matter.⁶² But in restricting the church’s action solely to the spiritual realm, Charles Hodge, the North’s Old School champion, charged Thornwell with introducing a peculiar theory of Presbyterianism; a theory which should exclude all discretionary power in the church, and tie her down to modes of action prescribed as of divine authority in the word of God. Hodge warned: There are certain things prescribed, to which every church ought to conform, and many things as to which she is at liberty to act as she deems best for God’s glory, and the advancement of his kingdom. Thornwell’s theory would silence the church’s witness and bind its conscience by way of a preposterous and suicidal inference. We supposed that it was in resistance to this very doctrine of inference [our fathers] poured out their blood like water. In their time, men inferred from Romans 13:1 … the doctrine of passive submission. … It was fetters forged from inferences our fathers broke, and we, their children will never suffer them to be rewelded.⁶³

Debates over the doctrine of the spirituality of the church became more important to most Presbyterian leaders—or at least more pressing—than the debates over Calvinistic doctrines that had divided Old and New School Presbyterians.⁶⁴ Extreme positions were eventually taken by many on both sides. When the Old School General Assembly called for a meeting in Philadelphia on May 16, 1861, four weeks after Fort Sumter fell, with nearly half of the Southern presbyteries unrepresented because their delegates could not travel, the Gardiner Spring Resolutions were adopted, which required members of the Presbyterian Church to profess unabated loyalty to the Federal Government.⁶⁵ Many deemed this as an egregious act. Benjamin Palmer said, It was attempted in the most august court of our Church to place the crown of Our Lord upon the head of Caesar—to bind that body, which is Christ’s fullness, to the chariot in which Caesar rides.⁶⁶ Even Charles Hodge and some sixty delegates signed a protest charging that the Assembly had "endangered the unity of the church by making unscriptural demands and a political opinion, a particular theory of the constitution, however correct and important that theory may be, the condition of membership in our body. They said: We regard the action of the Assembly as unjust and cruel in its bearing on our Southern brethren, and finally, we protest because we believe the act of the Assembly will greatly weaken the power of the church for good, and expose it to the danger of being carried away more and more from its true principles by a worldly or fanatical spirit."⁶⁷ Such were among the issues that led to the split of 1861 and the formation of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America, later known as Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS).

The Franklin Street congregation’s first and second pastor, William S. Plumer (1847–1854) and J. J. Bullock (1861–1870), believed that the ministry of the church was spiritual. Bullock was even arrested and imprisoned for a short time during the war for refusing to fly the Union flag on church grounds when ordered to do so.⁶⁸ The Franklin Street congregation remained in the Northern Old School church throughout the war. But in 1866 the congregation voted to unite with the Southern Presbyterian Church. Bitter accusations of treason, rebellion, schism, heresy, blasphemy, etc., had been traded between Southern and Northern Presbyterians throughout the war, and increasing tests of loyalty were imposed upon ministers on both sides. At the war’s end, some like Bullock and the Franklin Street congregation hoped cooler heads might prevail, prior resolutions might be rescinded, and earlier recriminations might abate. But the wounds were still too deep and emotions still too raw. On June 12, 1866, Bullock returned from the first postwar meeting of the Northern Old School General Assembly and reported: "The General Assembly has nothing in the matter aforesaid to change, nothing to explain, nothing to modify, nothing to take back, nothing to amend in any way, shape or form whatever. Adding insult to injury, Dr. Samuel Spear concluded his speech: I would hang Jefferson Davis, I would hang General Lee, and would keep on hanging the leading traitors until the judicial arm of the government had as fully vindicated Union, liberty and law, as have the swords of Grant and Sherman, to which Bullock said, the House thundered their approbation, arose to the feet and sang a patriotic song,