The Church Divides: 1837-1861

By 1837, the mainline Presbyterian church had already split into Old School and New School denominations. Twenty years later, in 1857, the New School divided along North-South lines, four years before the Civil War began.

When shots were fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, the Old School General Assembly still met together despite South Carolina’s secession. A New York minister named Gardner Spring pushed resolutions encouraging churches to support the federal government. The debate that followed reveals something remarkable about the era: assembly representatives actually corresponded by telegraph with White House cabinet members, seeking advice on whether to support these resolutions.

Attorney General Edward Bates advised against the Gardner Spring Resolutions, while Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase saw no objection to supporting the Constitution and union. Ultimately, the resolutions passed, forcing Southern Old School members to withdraw.

On December 4, 1861, in Augusta, Georgia, the Southern Old School formed a new church. This was the congregation where Woodrow Wilson’s father served as pastor. Within 25 years, one Presbyterian body had fractured into four separate denominations.

Presbyterian Fracturing at Its Peak

This period may represent the most fractured moment in American Presbyterian history. By the Civil War, you had:

• Four branches of the mainline church (Old School and New School, North and South)
• The RPCNA divided over constitutional issues
• The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in the South
• United Presbyterians in the North
• Cumberland Presbyterians in Kentucky and Tennessee
• Remnants of the Associate Synod

The Civil War became literally a war of brother against brother, with Christians on both sides. From the Northern churches, 270 ministers served as chaplains, while at least 130 Southern Old School ministers filled similar roles. Records indicate significant revivals occurred among troops during the war.

Stonewall Jackson: A Presbyterian General

Robert Dabney served as chaplain to the war’s most famous Presbyterian general, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Born in what’s now West Virginia, Jackson fought in the Mexican War before becoming an instructor at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington.

Jackson demonstrated genuine concern for African Americans’ spiritual welfare, organizing Sunday school classes for blacks in the community as early as 1855. He married twice, both wives being daughters of Presbyterian ministers. In 1857, four years before the war, his church elected him as a deacon. Jackson died from friendly fire during the conflict.

Local Church Life: First Presbyterian Church of Raleigh

While we can focus on grand denominational conflicts, daily church life continued even during wartime. First Presbyterian Church of Raleigh provides a window into how local congregations navigated this period.

From 1836 to 1855, Drury Lacy Jr. served as the church’s first pastor. His father had been president of Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, an important institution for training Southern Presbyterian ministers who didn’t want to travel north to Princeton Seminary.

In December 1855, 35-year-old Joseph Atkinson became pastor. This Princeton Seminary graduate would serve through the Civil War years. A contemporary described his ministry: “Pulpit ministrations of Mr. Atkinson were not calculated to produce great excitement and sudden reformation, but rather to lay those deep foundations of doctrinal truth so absolutely essential to all true godliness and Christian usefulness.”

Wartime Ministry and Reconstruction

During the war, Atkinson published sermons distributed among soldiers through Raleigh’s General Tract Agency. In one tract, he wrote: “When afflictions come, it is not enough that we bear a burden, we must cast our burden upon the Lord. Those who trust in the Lord during times of suffering shall be sustained.”

Like many Southerners, Atkinson quickly supported secession, calling the war “a spontaneous uprising of a whole people to repel lawless and atheistic aggressions.” He believed God sided with the Confederacy due to the South’s moral superiority, drawing parallels between Southern secession and the American Revolution’s break from English tyranny.

First Presbyterian Church included black members as early as 1857. After the war, when slaves gained freedom, many understandably chose to worship separately from churches that may have included former slave owners. By 1872, black members formed a new congregation affiliated with the Northern Presbyterian Church, which had established a board of missions for freedmen. Initially called Presbyterian Church Colored, it became Davie Street Presbyterian Church, which still exists today near Moore Square in Raleigh.

Church Schisms and Local Conflicts

The 1870s brought internal conflict to First Presbyterian Church. A property dispute between two members reached civil courts, dividing the congregation. Election confusion over church officers in 1877 increased tensions.

After Pastor Atkinson stepped down in 1875 for health reasons, some members petitioned Orange Presbytery to form a second church in Raleigh with Atkinson as pastor. Despite First Presbyterian’s session objecting that this would “crystallize hostile feelings” and create “rival institutions,” the presbytery approved the new congregation.

Second Presbyterian Church’s most famous member was Governor Zebulon Vance. Though initially uninterested in religion, he joined after his Presbyterian wife’s death. The church built a building downtown but never grew beyond 40 people, eventually dissolving in the 1890s as members returned to First Presbyterian.

Denominational Reunion in the South

When the war began, the Southern Old School immediately pursued union with the Southern New School. James Henley Thornwell opposed this union, but his death in 1862 removed the primary obstacle. In 1863, the Old School assembly appointed Robert Dabney to lead union discussions.

Dabney supported union partly from strategic concerns: if they didn’t absorb the New School, it might form its own seminary and grow stronger. Conservative Old School members insisted the union include repudiation of New School views, which was accomplished through Articles of Union condemning emotional manipulation in evangelism while affirming “true revivals of religion” and “scriptural warmth, affection, and directness.”

In 1864, a year before war’s end, the Southern churches reunited after 27 years of division. After the war, this body took the name Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), while the Northern church became the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA).

The Southern church had approximately 65,000 members and 1,300 churches, significantly smaller than the Northern church, which was about seven times larger. Despite its size, the PCUS became quite prominent in American religious life.

Northern Reunion and Its Consequences

In the North, Old School and New School churches remained separate throughout the war. Border state churches sympathetic to the South complicated Old School debates about slavery. After the war, many border churches left the Northern Old School to join the Southern Presbyterian Church, making Northern Old School members more amenable to union with the New School.

Charles Hodge strongly opposed this 1869 union, concerned about the New School’s lax confessional subscription and failure to repudiate Albert Barnes’ controversial views. Despite Hodge’s opposition, the New School voted unanimously for union, while only seven or eight Old School delegates opposed it.

The Gilded Age and Presbyterian Transformation

After 1869, two mainline Presbyterian churches existed: one Northern, one Southern. The Northern church would later split to form the OPC in 1936, while the Southern church would spawn the PCA in 1973.

Historians Darryl Hart and John Muether argue that after 1869, distinctively Presbyterian concerns became subordinate to broader American Protestant interests. The Civil War had “turned Presbyterian minds from their ecclesiastical differences to their common interest in the salvation of the Union.” This shift away from Presbyterian distinctives would contribute to issues leading to the OPC’s formation.

The post-war period brought massive changes. The South lay devastated: churches served as hospitals, ministers had died, congregations lost money invested in worthless Confederate currency. Meanwhile, the North entered the Gilded Age of economic prosperity lasting until the Great Depression.

Key developments included the transcontinental railroad’s completion (1869), Darwin’s “Descent of Man” (1871), the typewriter’s invention (1872), and Dwight Moody’s rise to prominence. Moody essentially created modern American evangelicalism, setting patterns that would influence Billy Graham and transform American religion.

Westward Expansion and Ecumenical Trends

The Northern church sent Sheldon Jackson west as superintendent for missions across Iowa, Nebraska, Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. Following railroad expansion, he helped plant approximately 100 churches among what he called “the tidal wave of wickedness” and “cesspools of iniquity” of frontier towns.

Simultaneously, Presbyterians increasingly pursued interdenominational cooperation through organizations like the Evangelical Alliance and Presbyterian Alliance. These groups focused on combating perceived atheism, immorality, and Roman Catholicism, the latter a concern due to Irish and Italian immigration.

Robert Dabney prophetically warned against such ecumenical movements: “There is little difference between a pope in singular and a pope in the plural number.” He predicted that efforts to unite Presbyterians would extend to all Protestants, creating “that combination of loose, unfaithful, doctrinal, broad churchism with the tyrannical enforcement of outward union and uniformity, which now characterizes popery.”

Dabney’s prediction proved accurate. In the 1920s, attempts to unite all North American Protestant denominations under one church prompted J. Gresham Machen to write “Christianity and Liberalism” (1923), leading to the OPC’s formation in 1936.

Conclusion

The Civil War period fundamentally transformed American Presbyterianism. What began as theological divisions between Old School and New School evolved into regional conflicts that ultimately subordinated distinctively Presbyterian concerns to broader American Protestant and political interests. The South’s devastation and the North’s prosperity during the Gilded Age created vastly different contexts for church development.

Meanwhile, evolutionary theory, urbanization, westward expansion, and immigration posed new challenges that would test Presbyterian theological foundations in the coming decades. The ecumenical trends that emerged, while intended to strengthen Protestant influence, would eventually contribute to the theological controversies that fractured Presbyterianism in the twentieth century.

Understanding this period helps us see how external pressures and internal compromises can gradually erode denominational distinctives, a pattern that would repeat in the Presbyterian controversies leading to both the OPC’s formation in 1936 and the PCA’s emergence in 1973.