The aftermath of the Civil War saw a significant rethinking of racial theory among southern Presbyterians. Benjamin Morgan Palmer Jr. and Robert Lewis Dabney in particular took up “a defense of separate southern Presbyterianism and religious segregation after the war.” Racial segregation and what can be described as a 19th Century predecessor to race realism defined Robert Lewis Dabney in particular, to the point he rejected the idea of black membership in Presbyterian churches.
Dabney and Palmer, notes Paul Harvey in his Christianity and Race in the American South, believed that “race” was the “most controlling sentiment known to the human heart.” Segregation, Palmer thought, should be worked out “under the direction of a wise Providence which still holds the destinies of the two [races] together.” God’s plan, according to Palmer, was a firm ecclesiological and political separation of the races, or at least of blacks and whites. God imnplemented his plan of separation by destroying “the unity of speech; Then by the actual dispersion, appointing the bounds of their habitation, to which they were conducted by the mysterious guidance of his will.”
Historians, particularly conservative religious historians, have been quick to baptize the views of Gilded Age Presbyterians as Biblicist, right or wrong. But Harvey helpfully sows doubt on an perceived absolute commitment to scripture in the abstract among southern Presbyterians by noting Dabney and Palmer “adopted certain arguments of a more scientific, postwar era…” Whereas James Henley Thornwell’s support for a slaveholding order coexisted with a visceral belief in the eventual reunion of the races, postwar Gilded Age Presbyterians argued for nothing of the sort. Anne Loveland notes that Thornwell saw an essential ecclesiastical unity in the human race that would, in time, be political and social. “We are not ashamed,” Thornwell wrote in 1850, “to call him [the black man] our brother.” Blacks and whites “were of one blood.”
Thornwell died before the rise of en masse Darwinism crept in to American academic institutions, and his biographer James O. Farmer thinks it unlikely that Thornwell would have been influenced by Darwin anyway. Thornwell’s “rationality was restricted by his faith in the bible.” Whereas Thornwell’s death in 1862 removed his from Darwinian influence, the same cannot be said for Dabney and Palmer, who lived until 1898 and 1902, respectively. It is likely that they were influenced, to some degree, by Darwinism and scientific racism, particularly Dabney, who worked in secular universities where the theory was more willingly accepted. Gilded Age “scientists, historians, and early anthropologists joined religious thinkers such as Palmer and Dabney in attacking any surviving notions of racial and spiritual equality.” Palmer’s polemics dovetailed easily with evolutionist who saw attempts to restore the unity of mankind “as providentially and signally rebuked.” Unity among the races by ecclesiastical means, the goal of Thornwell and particularly John Girardeau, was nothing more than “infidel humanitarianism.”
Gilded Age southern Presbyterians proved to be useful ecclesiastical handmaidens to Darwinian ideology, even if they rejected the scientific theory. Practically, even Dabney and Palmer seem unsure of what their beliefs looked like on the ground. Palmer in particular maintained significant pastoral relationships with Blacks in New Orleans and spoke of them fraternally (and paternally) in works like The Broken Home. Dabney warned about what he called “developmentalism,” a sort of analog to evolution. Nonetheless, it seems salient for the churchman and the historian is to recognize an essential disunity between southern Presbyterianism on race before the Civil War and after the Civil War, and to recognize that the idea of perpetual racial division was the progressive view, wedded more to Darwinism than to the conservative Protestant tradition.