SOUTHERN PRESBYTERIANS Most of these articles are from journals of history.

Transcription

1 SOUTHERN PRESBYTERIANS Most of these articles are from journals of history. compiled 2008 If you are a Southerner and a Presbyterian, these articles are about your roots. If you were not raised a Southerner but are a Southern Presbyterian, these articles reveal some of the roots of the culture in which you are trying to live. Nybakken, Elizabeth In the Irish Tradition: Pre-Revolutionary Academies in America, History of Education Quarterly, 37, 2 (Summer), The Irish in pre-revolutionary America were Presbyterians. Though they were not Southerners, they were ancestors of Southern Presbyterians. Presbyterian ministers composed a very high percentage of the schoolmasters in the South before government schools ran the academies out of business. I think one thing that distinguishes Presbyterians today from some other closely similar denominations is that Presbyterians are reading people. I expect members of those other denominations read their Bibles as much as Presbyterians, but are Presbyterians not also much given to reading other works including history, particularly political and constitutional history, and social commentary? I think so. Lee, Tommy Presbyterians and Revivalism: The New Side/Old Side Division Which Lasted from 1741 until p. Retrieved 07 Aug from the World Wide Web: The Old Side in this controversy was for decorum in religion. I may be wrong, but I believe that the opposition of Southern Presbyterians to emotional conversions and to the sort of preaching that incited them, lasted down until very recent times. Nybakken, Elizabeth I New Light on the Old Side: Irish Influences on Colonial Presbyterianism, The Journal of American History, 68, 4 (Mar.),

2 The influence of the Irish Presbyterians on Southern Presbyterianism is significant. Some of the Scotch-Irish people who came to America settled in the North; many more of them settled in the South. Some of the Southern Presbyterian churches were founded by Scottish people and French people; many more of them were founded by Scotch-Irish people. The tolerance of nonessential differences and local autonomy guided by flexible hierarchy that Nybakken assigns to Irish Presbyterian theology (820), is a characteristic of Southern culture generally. If the Irish lost in the struggle over the form that American Presbyterian Church government would take, some of their spirit survived in Southern culture and in the Southern Presbyterian s commitment to pure Scripture. Oakes, James "Masters of Tradition" in The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Most Southern Presbyterians were middle-class and above, traditionalists. This article is about upper-class, antebellum, Southern traditionalists. It is not that all or even most traditionalists of that era were upper-class, rather it is that members of the upper-class wrote the diaries and saved the letters that later historians used for their research. Of course, not all nor even most traditionalists were Presbyterian, but given that most Presbyterians were traditionalists, study of the traditionalists will give us some light on the Presbyterians. Smith, Elwyn A The Role of the South in the Presbyterian Schism of , Church History, 29, 1 (Mar.), The division of the church in 1837-`38 was not a north vs. south division but an Old School vs. New School division. In the New School branch, most or all northerners supported abolitionism and opposed slavery, while most or all southerners opposed abolitionism and supported slavery. In the Old School branch, the only northern Old Schoolers who supported abolitionism and opposed slavery were in the areas heavily settled by New Englanders. One northern Old Schooler not of New England extraction expressed his position thus: I believe I shall let the southern brethren manage their own concerns in their own way. Most or all Southern Old-Schoolers opposed abolitionism and supported slavery. Most Old-Schoolers, north and south opposed any discussion by the church of abolition.

3 Most New-Schoolers favored discussion of abolition by the church. The coming break between Old School and New School was apparent before the rise of abolitionism. It was over doctrinal matters in the church for which the split between Old School and New School was thorough, which the split over discussion of abolition was not. Bozeman, Theodore Dwight Inductive and Deductive Politics: Science and Society in Antebellum Presbyterian Thought, The Journal of American History, 64, 3 (Dec.), Bozeman depicts and analyzes the socially conservative philosophy of antebellum Old-School Presbyterians. Most Presbyterian churches of the Old South were Old- School. Many antebellum Northern Presbyterian churches were Old-School. Most of the New-School churches were in the North. Some of the New-School churches were in the South. Thornwell, James Henley Critical Notices: Contributions to Literature: Critical, Humourous, Biographical, Philosophical, and Poetical. By Samuel Gilman, DD, Southern Quarterly Review, n.s., 1, no. 2 (Aug.), Thornwell was the leading Presbyterian divine in the whole country. This review by him of a book written by another minister, reveals some of his thought concerning the proper way of worshiping God. In expressing that thought, he reveals a little bit about the way in which many Southern Presbyterian congregations conducted their worship services in DesChamps, Margaret Burr Union or Division? South Atlantic Presbyterians and Southern Nationalism, , The Journal of Southern History, 20, 4 (Nov.), This article shows how politics acted on, and were reacted to by, the Presbyterians of the antebellum southeastern United States, and as a part of this, how southeastern Presbyterians viewed the treatment of the Southern churches by the Presbyterian Church s General Assembly and by northern Presbyterians generally. The support for the Union, prior to Lincoln s election, by these southeastern Presbyterians was so strong that they preached it from the pulpit in opposition to

4 their strong belief that religion and politics should not be mixed. I would point out that northern sectionalism preceded and was a driving force for the southern sectionalism that DesChamps describes. Furthermore, it was not the fire-eaters who spread throughout the southern population fear that Lincoln would effect extreme and unconstitutional changes, as DesChamps asserts; it was that Lincoln was elevated into the presidency of the whole nation by the voters of only a section of the nation and that the section that for decades had been crying out for extreme and unconstitutional changes. Presbyterians, in my opinion, did not switch their support to Southern nationalism because fire-eaters gained control of public opinion, as DesChamps believes, but because facts swung public opinion to that which the fire-eaters held. Sellers, Charles Grier, Jr Who Were the Southern Whigs?, The American Historical Review, 59, 2 (Jan.), One scholar (DesChamps, 1954) said that almost all antebellum Southern Presbyterians were Whigs. This being the case, reading a bit about the Southern Whigs will tell us a bit about our ancestors and the culture that produced us (or maybe better, the culture that Presbyterians helped to make). Smith, H. Shelton The Church and the Social Order in the Old South as Interpreted by James H. Thornwell, Church History, 7, 2 (Jun.), Presbyterians and everyone else who lived in the South before the War Between the States, lived in a social system which included slavery, enslavement of about one-third of the population. James Henley Thornwell was the leading Presbyterian opinion maker of the Old South. This article summarizes Thornwell s thought on both slavery and free labor. His thought here was probably not different from the thought of most contemporary Southern Presbyterians. Monroe, Haskell Southern Presbyterians and the Secession Crisis, Civil War History, 6 (Dec.), According to Monroe, the great majority of Southern Presbyterians were Unionists

5 until Lincoln s election. Many in Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri remained Unionists until Lincoln s call for troops demonstrated his intention to use military power against his political enemies. Thereafter, the great majority of Southern Presbyterians ardently supported secession and the Confederacy. Missouri was an exception where the majority of Presbyterians remained Unionist during the war; but even those joined the Southern (PCUS) rather than the Northern (PCUSA) Church after the war. Maddex, Jack P From theocracy to Spirituality: The Southern Presbyterian Reversal on Church and State, Journal of Presbyterian History, 54 (Winter), The title of this article states clearly enough Maddex s thesis. I do not entirely agree with him. The policy concerning religious intrusion into governmental matters that the Southern Presbyterians held before and during the war, was not such a contrast, in my opinion, with the policy that they gravitated to after the war. I think that latter policy was what their policy would have been before if they and their whole culture had not been under such vituperative and constant attack before the war for their social conservatism, for their philosophy of government, for their institution of slavery, and so on, and under military attack during the war. In my opinion, they did not do the flip-flop that Maddex describes for them but only retrenched to what they would have preferred all along. Extremist attacks had required reaction and reply. An important fact demonstrated by Maddex is the cleansing of earlier documents to conform them to the latter policy, so as to give the appearance that the latter policy had been the policy all along. Dabney, Robert L "The Westminster Confession and Creeds" in The Memorial Volume of the Westminster Assembly. Richmond, Va.: Presbyterian Committee on Publications. Reprinted in David W. Hall and Joseph H. Hall, eds., Paradigms in Polity: Classic Readings in Reformed and Presbyterian Church Government. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (1994), Southern Presbyterians desire that their religion and their preaching be from the eternal truths of the Bible, not from the current reports of newspaper writers, or the current concerns of either social commentators or of even the preacher. The religious guidance that they accept, as this article shows, must be steeped in the teachings and traditions of their religion.

6 Neville, Gwen Kennedy "Kinfolks and the Covenant: Ethnic Community among Southern Presbyterians" in John W. Bennett, ed., The New Ethnicity: Perspectives from Ethnology Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society. St Paul: West Publishing Co., This article gives us a view of a slice of the culture of Southern Presbyterians in the recent past (early- to mid-twentieth century).