Book Bits (The Metaphysical Confederacy)

Every month or so I do a post called Book Briefs where I briefly highlight some of the books I’ve been reading. A couple months ago I introduced a variation on this theme: Book Bits. The aim is to give you a more in-depth look at a particularly important or provocative book. The approach is to give ten points from the book which can help you capture the central argument and big ideas. Think of it as the lazy man’s book review.

Today’s book is The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Mercer University Press, 1999 [1986]) by James O. Farmer, Jr.

In just under 300 pages, Farmer has given us a sensitive, sympathetic, but not uncritical intellectual biography of James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862). In his lifetime, Thornwell—who for a short time pastored First Presbyterian Church in Columbia (SC), a wonderful church where Sinclair Ferguson and Derek Thomas now serve—was the leading theologian in the South and quite possibly the most influential Presbyterian thinker in the country. Farmer’s scholarly work tries to understand Thornwell in his Southern context and explores the elements of his theology that were most connected to Southern values, including Thornwell’s defense of slavery. Farmer argues that Thornwell was one of the key figures, among many intellectuals, who shaped the idea of a metaphysical confederacy which was necessary for the creation of the actual Confederacy (16).

1. The Civil War (or, for others, the War Between the States) pit two competing worldviews against each other. “Two sets of values have been in opposition to one another through most of our history as a nation; one has cherished dynamism, cosmopolitanism, rationalism, and egalitarianism, while the other has preferred stability, localism, faith, and deference. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, these opposing value systems were taking on a sectional quality, and politically they expressed themselves most articulately in the debate over slavery. Hence, because this debate was ultimately won by the progressive North, and because the values of the nation prevailed over those of its minority region, modern historians who implicitly in these values have found the Old South backward, inferior, and tainted by evil” (2). Crucially, prior to 1850 Southern preachers and other intellectuals were often critical of the South, but as tensions with the North escalated, the self-critical spirit retreated and a full-throated apology for Southern values swelled in force and frequency (5, 16, 36).

2. Thornwell, like most Southerners, understood the regional conflicts of the nineteenth century in broad terms. “The parties to this conflict,” Thornwell wrote, “are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground—Christianity and atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake” (11). Thornwell saw abolitionism as one aspect of “a general spirit of madness and fanaticism” which included socialism, perfectionism, and, surprisingly enough, teetotalism (218). The anti-slavery views of the North were but one species of Northern liberalism, the rejection of “regulated liberty,” and a predilection for bigger government intrusion (222). As Eugene Genovese states in the foreword, “Thornwell’s defense of slavery may be seen as an extended footnote to his defense of Christian orthodoxy.”

3. The history of the South cannot be untangled from evangelical Christianity.  “Perhaps in no other culture has a particular form of religious expression been so prevalent and so influential as has orthodox Protestantism in the American South. Lacking the religious pluralism that produced the more tolerant increasingly secular societies of the North and West, the South did not develop a strong tradition of church-state separation” (285).

4. Thornwell was the leading figure not only in the South but in American Presbyterianism as a whole during the generation prior to the Civil War. When Benjamin Palmer first heard Thornwell preach, in Columbia’s First Presbyterian Church in 1839, he found that the preaching made up for in force and argument what it may have lacked in warmth (61). That church in Columbia grew to love and revere him, with many others marveling at his power and gifting. Henry Ward Beecher said Thornwell was “the most brilliant minister in the Old School Presbyterian Church, and the most brilliant debater in the General Assembly. . . .Whenever he was present in the Assembly, he was always the first person pointed out to a stranger” (63). In homage to his fellow South Carolinian, Thornwell was dubbed “the Calhoun of the Church” (175). In 1901, Southern Presbyterians would look back and conclude that to Thornwell more than anyone other individual, “our Church owes most of what is distinctive in her principles and polity” (280).

5. Thornwell could be unduly harsh, especially as a younger man. “So polemical did Thornwell become in arguments with his various adversaries that he later regretted the tone of much of his controversial writings” (66). Farmer also points out: “Thornwell’s life was full of personal sorrow because of the illness and deaths of four of his children, and some of his polemical work was produced under the strain of these tragedies” (66). And if he was a critical man, he was often most critical of himself. He lamented his own sins and shortcomings and found in Christ a genuine comfort for his wounded soul (129-130).

6. Interestingly, Thornwell, though cutting a slim, serious, angular figure, was no ascetic. “He enjoyed food, drink, cigars, and clothes, and insisted on the best quality that he could afford in all cases” (172).

7. Thornwell’s view of blacks was typical of white Southerns, but mitigated somewhat by his Christian commitments. “The notion of superior and inferior members of society, or the concept of relation, as it has been called, was central to Thornwell’s understanding of all social arrangements, particularly that of slavery. . . .That Thornwell was a racist should come as no surprise. It is difficult to measure the intensity of his racism, but his letters reveal no significant difference from the prevailing Southern view of the black man” (227). At the same time, Thornwell insisted that because of Adam and original sin whites and blacks shared a generic unity (227). Thornwell owned slaves but seems to have been an “easy and indulgent master” (229). He also objected to manstealing and the African slave trade (229-30).

8. Thornwell was not always pro-secession. He was an ardent unionist in 1830 and 1850 and opposed secession for South Carolina until late in 1860 (59). Seeing his country as God’s modern Israel, Thornwell clung to the hope, for as long as he could, that the sectional issues could be resolved without destroying the country (230). Even after the Presbyterians split, Thornwell drafted a “Farwell Letter” which he intended as a gesture of goodwill to the Northern Church. The Letter met with strong opposition and never went anywhere (280). In the end, Thornwell cast his lot squarely with secession and church division, but it was not his first impulse.

9. Thornwell’s defense of slavery was complicated and conflicted. Like many Southern clergy, Thornwell thoroughly rejected abolitionism and at the same time supported the effort to evangelize the slaves and improve their condition (211). He often expressed deep concern about the “abuses” and “evils” present in slavery. He called the South Carolina law against teaching slaves to read “disgraceful” (219). Thornwell acknowledged that slavery was not ideal. In one sense he even recognized that slavery was inconsistent with the gospel. “Slavery,” he asserted, “is a part of the curse which sin has introduced into the world, and stands in the same general relation to Christianity as poverty, sickness, disease or death. . . . It springs, not from the nature o man as man, nor from the nature of society as such, but from the nature of man as sinful and the nature of society as disordered” (224). He admitted that slavery was not a blessing and heaven would no more have slaves than it would have hospitals and beggars. And yet, he argued that slavery was not incompatible with the goals of a Christian life in a fallen world. He saw opportunities for sin and abuse in slavery, but not more so than in other systems and less so than in socialism and communism (224-225).

From our vantage point, Thornwell appears to be a man of two minds. He did not view blacks as equals with whites, and yet he believed they shared a common nature and needed the same gospel. He thought slavery was a result of the fall, but he also thought it was central to a well-ordered society. He tried to support the slave (through evangelism and education), but strongly supported the slavery the slave wanted to escape. (It seems Thornwell had little firsthand knowledge of how cruel slavery could be.) And though he did not think it the church’s place to condemn slavery, he frustrated some Southerners by insisting that the church had no right to commend slavery either. In the end, he was consistent in his doctrine of the spirituality of the church: the business of the church was to speak to master-slave relationships, not to address slavery itself (231-32).

10. Farmer concludes that “the metaphysical confederacy was a creature of paradox” (289). In a striking paragraph on the second to last page, Farmer argues that Southerners like Thornwell had one glaring blindspot, what he calls “the god of Southern nationalism.” They fled the modern liberal state and sought security in “that very nationalism which was becoming one of the chief deities of modern man.” The Southern clergy continually cautioned “against the idolatry and pride of nationalism, while embracing the Confederacy with a fervor surpassed by few parishioners. . . . For Thornwell the Calvinistic suspicion of human institutions was always mitigated by a powerful tendency to institutions of which he was a part.” (288). This meant a fierce loyalty to the Presbyterian Church, the United States, South Carolina, and slavery. “The conflict inherent in such loyalties would be resolved only with great pain” (288).