We’re continuing our journey through Presbyterian history, picking up where we left off with the Old School-New School division of 1838 and diving into one of the most painful and complex chapters in our denominational story.

To set the stage, let me remind you where we were. By 1838, the Presbyterian Church had grown from about 20,000 members in 1800 to roughly 250,000 people. For context, that’s smaller than the Orthodox Presbyterian Church today, which has about 30,000 members. But remember, America’s population was quite a bit smaller then too.

The Growth of the Young Nation and Church

This was an era of explosive growth. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 had dramatically expanded American territory westward, and people were pushing into what we now call Tennessee, Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky. The 1840s would bring the rest of the contiguous United States after the war with Mexico, along with the Pacific Northwest.

The church was growing rapidly during the Second Great Awakening, the age of Charles Finney and widespread revivals. It was also the era of seminary founding. Princeton Seminary was established around 1810-1812, followed by Union Seminary (now in Richmond), Auburn in New York (1818), Pittsburgh Seminary (originally Western Seminary), Columbia Seminary in South Carolina, Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, and many others.

This was also the age of missions, both domestic and foreign. As the nation moved west, there were huge efforts to plant churches and spread the gospel on the frontier. The Presbyterian Church sent its first missionaries to Liberia in the 1830s, a nation formed on the African coast where many hoped freed slaves could return and establish a Christian nation. Missionaries also went to India and what is now Pakistan.

In 1859, Ashbel Simonton went to Brazil and helped establish the first Presbyterian church there in 1862, followed by a presbytery in 1865. Brazil now has about seven hundred thousand Presbyterian members in a conservative denomination—more Presbyterians than we have in all of the United States combined.

The Two Schools After 1838

After the dramatic split of 1838, we had two mainline Presbyterian denominations. The New School, which had essentially been kicked out of the General Assembly, called themselves the Constitutional Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. The Old School called itself the Reforming Assembly.

The New School Character

The New School was the more moderate group, less strict on confessional subscription, and generally more abolitionist, though there was diversity within both camps. They were concentrated more in the North than in the South.

It’s important to remember that while historians identify these two distinct parties, most people were probably right in the middle. The moderate New Schoolers and moderate Old Schoolers weren’t really all that different. Most ministers and people in the pews were largely centrist—a helpful thing to remember as churches can get polarized over controversy. There’s probably often much more unity than appears even within polarization.

The New School was more favorable to Charles Finney’s revival methods, though they also ended up being quite critical of Finney’s theology. It’s complicated—they were both more open to new measures but also critical of Finney’s essentially Pelagian rejection of Calvinism and his manipulative emotional techniques.

Interestingly, the New Schoolers took the Old School assembly to civil court in Pennsylvania and were actually declared the rightful heir of the denomination.

The Old School Response

Charles Hodge, who was young when the split happened but became a very prominent Old Schooler teaching at Princeton Seminary, wrote a lengthy “Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church” arguing that the Old School was right because they had history on their side. From 1822 to 1878, Hodge taught more Presbyterian students than any other seminary professor of the 19th century.

But the Old Schoolers weren’t of one mind either. Hodge had extensive debates with James Henley Thornwell, a Southern Presbyterian, over church polity issues like the role of ruling elders and whether churches should use boards versus commissions for mission work.

The Slavery Question Emerges

Presbyterians had debated slavery from the beginning. Samuel Davies in the 1700s didn’t argue for abolition but was committed to instructing slaves in the faith. John Witherspoon, prominent in the American Revolution and president of Princeton University, said it was “certainly unlawful to make inroads upon others and take away their liberty by no better right than superior power.”

After the Revolution, most Americans and most Presbyterians favored, at least in theory, gradual emancipation of slaves. They thought slavery wasn’t compatible with American freedom, but they didn’t want immediate abolition.

Early Church Positions

The 1818 General Assembly of the unified church declared slavery “a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature” and “a violation of the laws of God.” Yet they weren’t arguing for immediate abolition—they wanted some kind of ill-defined gradual emancipation.

At the same time, a Virginia minister named George Bourne wrote “The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable,” arguing that the Bible and slavery were incompatible. He went around harshly criticizing slave owners, saying slaveholding and church membership were incompatible. Because of his methods, his presbytery charged him with “unwarranted and unchristian” behavior and removed him from ministry. He became seen as a martyr of abolitionism.

The Polarization Intensifies

The 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion really polarized the movement. Nat Turner, a preacher and slave, led a rebellion that killed 50 or 60 white people. This entrenched both sides—abolitionists became more firm in their views, and those who thought the Bible permitted slavery also became more entrenched.

Two prominent Southerners, Robert Louis Dabney and James Henley Thornwell, became staunch defenders of slavery, even arguing that the Bible made slavery a positive good. Dabney, at 20 years old after the Nat Turner Rebellion, said the “unauthorized attempts to strike off the fetter of our slaves has but riveted them on faster.”

Thornwell argued in the 1850s: “The scriptures not only fail to condemn slavery, they distinctly sanction it as any other social condition of man. The relation was divinely regulated among the chosen people of God and the peculiar duties of parties are inculcated under the Christian economy.”

After the war, Dabney wrote “A Defense of Virginia and the South,” defending chattel slavery and arguing that “for the African race, such as Providence has made it, and where he has placed it in America, slavery was the righteous, the best, and yea, the only tolerable relation.”

The Complicated Picture

Yet this is a complicated story with faithful ministry on all sides. John Girardeau became pastor of Zion Presbyterian Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 1854. Starting with 30 people, mostly black, it grew to 1,500 people before the war—a predominantly black congregation pastored by a white minister. After the war, Girardeau was one of the first to ordain free black elders.

James Lyon in Mississippi worked to end mistreatment of slaves, brought proposals to his presbytery to advocate for blacks and whites worshiping together, and established catechism classes for slaves.

The Doctrine of the Spirituality of the Church

The Old School championed what was called “the doctrine of the spirituality of the church.” This view held that the church is spiritual and should let civil and political affairs govern themselves—the church shouldn’t have an official say in political matters.

J. Gresham Machen, one of the founders of the OPC, later wrote about this doctrine: “You cannot expect from a true Christian church an official pronouncement upon the political and social questions of the day, and you cannot expect cooperation with the state in anything involving the use of force… The function of the church in its corporate capacity is entirely different. Its weapons against evil are spiritual, not carnal.”

In theory, this allowed Old Schoolers to have different views about slavery without bringing them into church courts. But critics have called them out for inconsistency—they seemed to apply this doctrine when it met their ends, sometimes including the perpetuation of slavery.

The Final Splits Leading to War

The divisions continued. In 1857, the New School Assembly split between North and South—the same year as the Dred Scott decision, which removed constitutional rights from free blacks. For context, the Baptists had already divided in 1845 (creating the Southern Baptist Church), and the Methodists divided the same year.

The Old Schoolers, North and South, stuck together longer. They had declared in 1845 that slaveholders would not be disciplined in the church, largely under the spirituality of the church logic.

But in May 1861, one month after shots were fired at Fort Sumter, the Old School General Assembly passed the Gardiner Spring Resolutions. These required all in the church to “do all in their power to promote and perpetuate the integrity of the United States and to strengthen, uphold, and encourage the federal government.”

You can imagine this didn’t go over well with Southern Old Schoolers when South Carolina had already seceded and war had begun. Some protested, arguing that “the Bible does not enable any man to decide whether these United States are a nation or a voluntary confederacy of nations. The church has no voice in the decision on this question.”

Conclusion: From One Church to Four

On December 4, 1861, the Old School church in the South was established, believing it had been unconstitutionally removed from the broader Old School body through the Spring Resolutions. It held its first General Assembly in Augusta, Georgia, with 840 ministers and 72,000 members.

Interestingly, the First Presbyterian Church of Augusta was pastored by the father of an eight-year-old boy named Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who would later become President of the United States—one of eight Presbyterian presidents.

By the early 1860s, what had been one mainline Presbyterian church in the 1830s had become four: Old School and New School churches in both North and South. This painful division reflected the broader tensions tearing the nation apart, showing how even the church struggled with the enormous moral and political questions of the day.

The story reminds us that church history is messy, complicated, and filled with faithful people who sometimes reached very different conclusions about difficult issues. It challenges us to approach our own controversies with both conviction and humility, remembering that God’s people have always wrestled with how to faithfully apply Scripture to the challenges of their time.