Dabney’s Political Thought: Calvinian In An American Way

By Mark J. Larson

The nineteenth-century Reformed theologian Robert Dabney had immense talent and significant influence in the church. [1] In addition, he had a colorful and charismatic career as an officer in the Civil War. [2] Despite his “larger than life” standing, little scholarly attention is devoted to him. [3] This is particularly true with respect to his political philosophy, which was learned and provocative. Douglas Kelly opines that Dabney manifested a “wider and deeper cultural, social, and political interest than any other theologian of nineteenth-century America.” [4] He mastered the principles of political philosophy, and there is much to be gained by considering the salient features of his distinctively American political thought. [5]

Although Dabney sided with the Confederate States of America, he was convinced that his political thought was that of a true American patriot. [6] He believed that America was special, embracing a redeemer-nation conception for the role that America was to play upon the world stage. He saw the light of America shining upon the darkness of the nations, teaching them to live in peace: “We hoped the Empire Republic would teach the angry nations nobler triumphs than those of war.” [7] He then expressed his vision for the role of America in these words: “That dream we had indulged” was “that here a nation was to grow up…which should come by the righteous arts of peace to a greatness such as at last to shame and frighten war away from the family of kingdoms.” [8] Dabney is generally regarded as an illustrious exponent of conservatism. [9] Holifield asserts, “He became known as a champion of unyielding conservatism.” [10] Lucas declares that he was “profoundly conservative.” [11] And Hettle observes that “the image of Dabney as an archconservative warrior for the Lost Cause has been described by many historians.” [12] He adds, “The conventional portrait of this theologian depicts him as an irreconcilable old fogy of the Lost Cause.” [13]

The thesis of this essay is that the conservative Dabney needs to be viewed from an additional perspective. He had a strong progressive element in his political theory. It is true that his political thought largely stands in continuity with documents of the historical past— namely, the Bible and the perspectives of Calvinist theology. [14] More than that, “Dabney abhorred all those who innovated from the older Calvinist creed.” [15] Nevertheless, Dabney was willing to move beyond the political thought of Calvin, embracing American views on church and state and freedom of religion. The legitimacy of this position will become apparent as we discuss, in order, his political perspective, his teaching on the origin and foundation of government, and his distinctively American conception of the relationship of church and state and religious freedom.

Whig, Calvinist, And Puritan

For the new American Republic, the nineteenth century was a revolutionary period in terms of the increasing spirit of egalitarianism and the rapid movement toward democratization. There is no question that egalitarianism was “powerfully at work in the new nation.” [16] The states of the Atlantic were “putting ballots into the laborers and mechanics whom the Fathers of the Republic had feared.” [17]

At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, it was common for the states to restrict the franchise in terms of religious or property qualifications. [18] By the 1830s, however, most of the states had already moved in the direction of universal white manhood suffrage. [19] The North, in particular, had developed a “leveling” society. [20] This radical change in America involving the rise of the common man is perhaps best symbolized by the masses tromping around in the White House at the inauguration of Andrew Jackson. [21]

In one sense, Dabney may be identified as a Whig because of his vigorous opposition to the doctrine of a divine-right monarchy. He described this monarchical theory as being a “most vicious extreme” and a “servile theory.” [22] Dabney’s strong denunciation of monarchical absolutism places him in continuity with the English Whig tradition of the eighteenth century, which asserted the rights of Parliament over against an absolutist monarchy. [23]

His Whig political cast [24] is particularly seen, however, in the fact that like most Old Schoolers, [25] he was disgusted by Jacksonian “pandering to the people.” [26] He recognized that the country was moving ever more in a democratic direction. [27] The movement toward a pure democracy entailed “the attempt to confer upon all the same franchises.” [28] Dabney remained adamantly opposed to the new power of the tumultuous masses. [29] He “hated” absolute democracy. [30] He believed that the Jacobin principle of the rule of the mob was worse than a government led by an oppressive despot. “The practical government which results from this theory,” he remarked, “is simple absolutism, differing from the personal despotism of a Sultan or a Czar only in this particular, that its victims have that ‘many headed monster,’ the mob, for their master, always liable to be more remorseless and greedy in its oppressions than a single tyrant.” [31]

The drift of the nation toward increasing democratization was closely connected with the philosophy of egalitarianism, [32] the notion of a radical social and political equality between all people, the idea that “Every man is as good as his neighbor.” [33] Dabney described this as the Jacobin conception of equality in which “every sane human being has a moral right to a mechanical equality with every other in every specific privilege and franchise.” [34] In the opinion of Dabney, not every citizen should have the right to vote. [35] “The right of suffrage,” he said, “is not an inalienable natural franchise, but a function of responsibility entrusted to suitable classes of citizens as a trust.” [36]

The South, of course, was “semi-feudal,” [37] in which society was arranged in more of a hierarchical structure. [38] It was self-evident to Dabney that the social order must distinguish between a ruling class and a class which is ruled. [39] In his judgment, the egalitarian idea was utter foolishness. He asked, “Are all men naturally equal in strength, in virtue, in capacity, or in right?” He responded, “The thought is preposterous.” [40]

The fundamental reason for his opposition to democracy as a form of civil polity was due to his distrust of the common man. Dabney was under no illusion that the people were “the spring of innocence and virtue.” [41] Among the masses were the “foolish and morally incompetent.” [42] Such statements demonstrate that Dabney stood in the mainstream of Old School Presbyterianism, “the branch of the antebellum Presbyterian church that refused to acquiesce in the rising current of optimism about man and his capacities.” [43]

Why did Dabney have such a low view of the people? The explanation is theological and, more specifically, anthropological. He positioned himself in the Calvinist tradition, which heavily emphasizes the doctrine of total depravity. Dabney’s theology stood in harmony with that of Calvin, the Reformer of Geneva. His biographer even makes this contention: “The peculiar genius of Dabney’s exposition of the theology of the Christian Scriptures brings him into closer accord with the great Calvin himself, in several essential particulars, than any other modern American theologian is brought by his system.” [44]

It was his theological orientation that placed him in opposition to the Jacksonian elevation of the common man. There indeed is a significant connection between theology and political philosophy. Gregg Singer appropriately remarked, “Political philosophies are not created in a vacuum, but are in turn the product of systems of thought which find their inspiration and nurture in theology.” [45] Doubtless the Calvinist emphasis upon man’s fallen, sinful condition contributed toward Dabney’s antipathy toward the Jacksonian Democrats. [46]

In the Whig tradition, Dabney opposed the American drift toward democracy. At the same time, he expressed his allegiance toward republicanism—that is, representative democracy. [47] For Dabney, the people ought not to rule, but they had the right to choose their own rulers. “The power of selecting rulers,” he said, “should be in the citizens.” [48]

The republicanism embraced by Dabney espoused the principle of representative government. In his commitment to republicanism, Dabney stood in continuity with Calvin who believed that the best form of government was the mixed government of a republic, composed of elected officials—the aristocracy—and enfranchised citizens with the right to democratic processes. [49]

Dabney’s republicanism, though, had another dimension: it was also a Puritan kind of republicanism. Puritanical republicanism had two major characteristics. It recognized, first, the inevitable collapse of civilizations. It had a “preoccupation with the mortality of republics.” [50] Sin is the problem that brings down governments. It affirmed, secondly, that repentance or moral change is the answer to the demise of a society. Puritanical republicanism sought a “moral solution” to the problem of the “mortality of republics.” It was to “make better people.” [51]

In the period immediately preceding the Civil War, Dabney believed that the death of the American republic was imminent. He expressed his apprehensiveness concerning the future of the nation. “A long farewell to that dream we had indulged,” he asserted, “that here a nation was to grow up…composed of the strong, the free, the bold.” He lamented, “Our future growth will be swallowed by the devouring maw of strife…. Despots will sing their scornful pæans over the realizing of all their envious prophecies that our liberty would run into license and our freedom be used for self-destruction.” [52]

What specific sins were bringing the judgment of God upon the great Republic? [53] Dabney believed that the divine chastisement was because of the sins of both state and the people. He was by no means unique in his view that the “fratricidal war” was a “divine visitation upon the land for the sins of all Americans.” This was a common viewpoint “among the religious folk of the time.” [54] Dabney also had no doubt that governments do sin. He strongly declared,

“No existing government is perfectly equitable, because executed by man’s imperfect hands.” [55] A government may sin by its deficiencies or its excesses. It may do too little. In Dabney’s view, the Southern state governments had failed in their judicial function, specifically with reference to their failure to prosecute duelists. The charge that he leveled was serious: “You have allowed too often the man of violence, the duelist…to stalk through the land with wrongs upon his angry tongue and blood upon his hand, while his crime was winked at by justice.” [56]

Dabney affirmed that the “peculiar sin” of the South was this “passion for bloody retaliation.” [57] There indeed was a Southern “compulsion to avenge insult” on the dueling field. [58] While dueling was introduced during the American Revolution, it persisted in the South for a longer period of time than it did in the North. [59] The failure of the states to bring duelists to justice may have been due to the general climate of acceptance throughout the South of the right to defend one’s honor. There was no need for the man who “killed his adversary in a personal quarrel” to “fear public disgrace.” [60] The duelist with “blood upon his hand” had been “almost applauded by a corrupt public opinion.” [61]

Government may also do too much. It may sin not only by omission, but also by commission. Immediately following the Civil War, Dabney referred to the government of the United States as being an “oppressive government,” which had, he said, “literally” exterminated the South. [62] At the time, he announced his determination not to live under “Yankee despotism.” [63] Dabney was particularly concerned about the moral behavior of the Congress. There was, for example, the disgraceful episode of May 22, 1856, when Senator Preston Brooks (South Carolina) savagely attacked Senator Charles Sumner (Massachusetts). The vicious beating left Senator Sumner fallen, bleeding, and without consciousness. Sumner spent the next three and a half years convalescing. In a sermon preached on November 1, 1860, Dabney made a specific reference to this event: “Four years ago an instance of unjust and wicked insolence was avenged on the floor of the Senate of the United States, by an act of ill-judged violence.” [64]

Of equal concern, however, was the bitter railing and the use of “weapons of personal abuse” in the public arena. [65] Dabney contended that inappropriate political discourse may lead to unimagined horrors. “The reign of terror” in the French Revolution, he said, was largely due to “unscrupulous leaders” and their “imputing odious and malignant motives to all adversaries.” [66]

This then was the standpoint from which Dabney viewed the political events of his time. In the Whig tradition, he opposed the leveling of American society resulting from the drift toward democracy and egalitarianism. As a Calvinist, he distrusted the common man. As an adherent of a Puritan kind of republicanism, he was a champion of representative democracy; but he also focused upon the sins of the state and the people along with the judicial consequences of that sin— divine judgment and the dissolution of the nation.

Having considered the perspective from which he observed the political arena, we shall now reflect upon the place which he gave to God and man in the origin of government, and the role which he attributed to the Bible in the foundation of government.

Government’s Origin And Foundation

Dabney embraced a puritanical republicanism. One thus anticipates that he would reject the idea of a merely human origin to civil government, and this indeed turns out to be the case.

Dabney opposed the classical contract theories that traced the origin of government to the will of man. There were differences among the various social contract theorists—thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. They all agreed, however, with the view that man once existed in a state of nature, a condition in which humans were “by nature absolutely free.”67 Due to a number of problems, “inconveniences, and mutual violences,” men “entered into a compact with each other,” thereby agreeing to establish government. [68] Dabney’s reference to “inconveniences” is probably an allusion to Locke’s theory that governments were initially established to settle disputes. The expression “mutual violences” is no doubt a reference to Hobbes’s theory that the state of nature was “nasty, brutish, and short.” [69]

The problem that Dabney had with this conception is simple. It was “utterly devoid of experimental evidence.” [70] Dabney therefore rejected the contract theory of the origin of government, regarding it as “a legal fiction.” [71] He cited William Blackstone and Jean Jacques Burlamaqui who had both argued that the social contract theory had no real basis in fact. [72] “Men never existed,” contended Dabney, “in the insulated state supposed, and did not actually pass out of that state into a commonwealth state, by a formal contract.” [73]

Dabney did not rest content with the concept of a merely human origin to government. He contended that government comes from God in terms of ordinance and the appointment of specific statesmen. It is God who ordained the existence of government. Dabney described it not only as “God’s ordinance,” but also “if it be just, one of his greatest temporal blessings.” [74] In addition, political leaders are the very ministers of God. “Magistrates,” Dabney asserted, are “His agents or ministers.” As the ministers of God, they “rule by His providence.” [75] Dabney illustrated his point by appealing to specific historical figures. He was impressed with William of Orange (1533– 1584), describing him as “the Washington of the Netherlands, the most cool, deliberate, astute, far-seeing of statesmen, and most holy patriot and Christian.” [76] He was also enthused by his fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson. He referred to him as “the sagacious Jefferson.” [77]

Although governments are raised by God under His providential superintendence, they are established by men in the actual course of history. This means that Dabney had to give attention to the proper foundation of a just government. He leaned in the direction of biblicism in his considerations at this point. This is not to say that he believed that the Bible dictates a specific kind of government. He affirmed, “The thing…which God ordains is not a particular form of government, but that men shall maintain some form of government.” [78] He did, however, indicate that constitutional governments do, in fact, arise from biblical principles: “The Scriptures…teach, by precept and implication, those equitable principles on which all constitutional governments are founded.” [79] Although the Scripture does not demand a particular type of constitutional government, he believed that it revealed the divine partiality for the principle of republicanism. He spoke about “God’s preference for the representative republic.” [80]

We have seen that Dabney opposed much of the political thought of his time. He despised pure democracy and Jacobin egalitarianism. He opposed inordinate and exclusive attention given to man as the originator of government. There is another sense, however, in which he stood more in line with American political thought: he was a proponent of the Constitutional structure providing for the separation of church and state and the freedom of religion. [81]

The First Amendment addresses both of these issues: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The American Way: Going Beyond The Reformation

There is no question that Dabney stood in the conservative tradition, opposed to the radical movements of his time and aligning himself with historical principles rooted in the Bible and Calvinist theology. There is, however, a strong progressive element in his thinking. His willingness to move beyond Reformation thought patterns is seen at two points. He distanced himself beyond the sixteenth-century Calvinian arrangement in his advocacy of church-state separation (rejecting the long-accepted practice of an established church) and in his vigorous promotion of religious freedom, the right of liberty of conscience. In both of these respects, his political philosophy is distinctively American. Indeed, Dabney understood that his position on church and state was uniquely American. He affirmed, “The separation and independence of Church and State was not only not the doctrine of the Reformation. No Christian nation holds it to this day, except ours.” [82]

Dabney’s adherence to American institutions is seen in his arguments regarding the separation of church and state. “Church and State are distinct institutions,” he declared. [83] As such, they necessarily have different jurisdictions, purposes, and duties. The church is not to take on the functions of the state. The end of the church relates to the salvation of souls. “Her object,” he affirmed, is “the hearty belief of saving truth.” [84]

The distinctive aim of each institution may be described in terms of time and eternity: “The ends of the State are for time and earth; those of the Church are for eternity.” [85] In the most general sense, government is to have a beneficial purpose for the people. In the context of his argument against a divine-right monarchy, Dabney specified that “the government is for the governed, not for the especial benefit of the governors.”

The specific aim of the state—to be an instrument of good— focuses upon two objectives in Dabney’s thought: order and justice; and the protection of life, liberty, and property. The state exists, Dabney believed, for the realization of “secular” order. [86] This is related to the matter of protection and security: “The State is to protect each citizen in the enjoyment of temporal rights.” [87] There were three temporal rights which he specifically had in mind: “life, liberty, and property,” what Dabney also labeled as “secular rights.” [88]

The reference to property seems to be Dabney’s own revision of the affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that “governments are instituted among men” for the purpose of securing certain “unalienable rights,” namely, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Dabney also liked to speak about two temporal rights by referring to “the security of life and property which the magistrate is intended to provide by his power of punishing.” [89] His stress upon the protection of property stood in continuity with the view of most southern whites that “the chief duty of government was the protection of men’s property.” [90]

Just as the church and state have different jurisdictions and purposes, so they have different functions. The kinds of authority and responsibility entrusted to each institution are dissimilar. Whereas the church has been given the power of the keys, the state has received the power of the sword. Describing church power negatively, Dabney stated, “The Church has no civil pains and penalties at command; because Christ has given her none; and because they have no relevancy whatever to produce her object—the hearty belief of saving truth.” [91] The church, in the use of the keys, must give itself to instruction. “The Church is to teach men the way to heaven, and to help them thither.” [92]

The state, in contrast to the church, may exercise force. Dabney affirmed that there are three prominent functions of civil government. These include “taxation, punishment, including capital for capital crimes, and defensive war.” [93] Governments thus have the authority and duty “to maintain internal order and external defense against aggression.” [94]

Dabney was heartily committed to the twofold use of the sword, but he gloried in particular in the past military achievements of the United States. In an 1856 article, he looked to the past history of the Republic and reflected upon how the federal government had wielded the sword valiantly and successfully in past military engagements against the enemies of the United States. Americans, he affirmed, had displayed “terrible prowess” and “withstood all the force of the British lion while we were yet in the gristle of our youth.” He then alluded to the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, in which the United States had “overthrown and broken and pierced every enemy with the lion’s force and the swiftness of the king of birds combined.” [95] Later, in connection with the Civil War, Dabney bemoaned the fact that the Confederacy had not adequately armed itself in preparation. [96]

The separation of church and state doctrine, as embraced by Dabney, emphasized the distinction in jurisdiction, ends, and functions between the two institutions. In its American setting, church-state separation also meant opposition to the concept of an established church.

The First Amendment in its anti-establishment declaration— “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”—prohibited the national government from establishing a tax-supported national church. [97] It has been well said that this provision originally “succeeded not in separating church and state but only church and national state, or church and nation.” [98] In fact, the First Amendment was “intended to limit only the national government, and any attempt to broaden its coverage to forbid state religious establishment…would surely have failed.” [99] At the time the Constitution was adopted, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, South Carolina, and Maryland continued to have “tax-supported established churches.” [100]

Over time, one state after another disestablished the church; Dabney could later say, “The American constitutions now all deny to the states the right to establish or endow any form of religion, true or false.” [101] The move toward disestablishment no doubt pleased him. He wrote about “the leaden weight of State patronage” [102] and resisted an established church structure because of its deleterious effects. For Dabney, a church establishment has a negative consequence, which he identified as a “usual result.” [103] It is quite typical, he affirmed, for “an endowed Church” to “effect less for true religion and public morals, than voluntary churches.” What argument did he set forth in support of this thesis? He maintained that civil rulers are usually nonreligious: “The Rulers themselves will usually have a personal character irreligious, carnal, anti-evangelical.” The consequence of such worldly politicians will necessarily be harmful for the church: “If the State selects preachers, some individual officers of the State select them; and the least evangelical will most frequently be selected.” [104]

In terms of his rejection of the Reformation model, which accepted the legitimacy of an established-church structure, Dabney was not so much a conservative as a progressive. A second way in which he dissented from the Calvinist Reformers was in his advocacy of freedom of religion, or liberty of conscience. In this sense as well, his political thought is distinctively American. Dabney described the American nation as “the great experiment of equal laws and a free conscience.” [105]

Dabney opposed the position of the Calvinist forefathers who maintained that the civil magistrate must preserve and restore the true religion, [106] while at the same time punishing, even with death, the despisers of true religion. [107] Indeed, Calvinist writers of the sixteenth century affirmed that “the prime duty of all government” was “the maintenance of the ‘true’ religion.” [108] It is most significant that the classical position was so firmly rejected by an Old School Calvinist like Dabney. [109] He resolutely affirmed, “We discard the theocratic conception of civil government.” [110]

With respect to the issue of punishing the person who refuses faith in Christian truth, Dabney asserted, “Penalties have no relevancy whatever to beget belief. Evidence begets conviction; not fear and pain.” [111] As to the issue of the religious heretic who is a law-abiding and peaceful citizen, Dabney offered this consideration to give pause to the religious persecutor: “Moral, merciful, peaceful men” are “punished with the pains due to the most atrocious crimes, because they do not take certain arguments in a certain way.” [112] In addition, Dabney offered this pragmatic argument: “Religious sects are nearly harmless to the State, when they are no longer persecuted.” [113]

Dabney’s commitment to freedom of conscience was directly related to the issue of rights. The state is the society of rights. Dabney brought forth the additional notion of “inalienable natural rights”— affirming that “liberty of thought, inquiry, and belief,” apart from compulsion, is something that cannot be taken away. [114] If the state is the society of rights, protection must be offered to the non-Christian. The same perspective was embraced pertaining to the political leaders who might occupy positions in government. The first state constitutions had, of course, applied religious tests that excluded from political office such infidels as Jews and Unitarians. [115] But Dabney did not insist upon theological orthodoxy as a requirement of political trust. [116] He did, however, insist upon a moral life: “Orthodoxy or spirituality are not qualifications requisite for its magistrates, according to the law of nature, but only secular virtue and intelligence.” [117] This was a strong emphasis in his teaching: political rulers must conduct themselves morally. He admonished, “The Christians of this country must sternly claim, that wicked men shall no longer hold the helm of state.” [118] Again, he declared, “The Christians of this country must sternly claim that wicked or reckless men shall no longer hold the helm of state; that political orthodoxy shall no longer atone for that worst offence against citizenship, a wicked life.” [119] Dabney clearly wanted “an aristocracy of virtue.”

The preceding discussion has shown that Dabney ought not to be viewed purely in terms of conservatism, merely reproducing on American soil the totality of Calvinist teaching without deviation or refinement in understanding. On the basis of biblical reflection and rational consideration, he was willing to progress beyond certain classical Reformed positions on the doctrine of the state.

Conclusion: “Well Grounded In The True Doctrine”

Dabney’s fundamental conservatism is reflected in the Whig and Puritan political platform from which he viewed the tumultuous events of his time. His commitment to Calvinist political thought surfaces in his insistence that government originates with God. On the issue of the foundation of government, Dabney shows the principle of Biblicism. In addition, there is a real element of progressivism in his political philosophy, manifested in his choice of American rather than Calvinist patterns of thought on the issue of church-state separation and religious freedom.

The doctrine of the state was of central importance to Dabney. He reflected upon its significance for the teachers of the church: “The duty of the Christian citizen to civil society is so extensive and important, and so many questions arise as to its limits and nature, the propriety of holding office, the powers exercised by the civil magistrate, etc., that the teacher of the Church should be well grounded in the true doctrine of the nature of the commonwealth.” [120]

As one of the pre-eminent teachers of the church, Dabney was not only well grounded in his political philosophy, but regardless of how many of his views one can agree with, he also made a significant contribution to the ongoing development of Calvinist political thought in the nineteenth century.

Notes

1. Historians do not dispute Dabney’s high intellectual caliber. His first biographer believed him to be a superior theologian to Hodge, Shedd, and Thornwell (Thomas Cary Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney [Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1977], 557). Douglas F. Kelly conjectures that Dabney was “perhaps the greatest…Southern theologian of nineteenth-century America” (“Robert Lewis Dabney,” in Southern Reformed Theology, ed. David F. Wells [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989], 37). As to his influence on coming generations, Morton Smith suspects that Dabney may have had a greater impact than even James Thornwell; Dabney produced a complete systematic theology, while Thornwell was unable to do so, dying at the early age of forty-nine (Studies in Southern Presbyterian Theology [Amsterdam: Drukkerij En Uitgeverij Jacob Van Campen, 1962], 183). E. Brooks Holifield maintains that his professorship at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia became “one of the most influential positions” in Southern Presbyterianism (The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1794-1860 [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978], 87).
2. Dabney experienced firsthand the realities of war. Initially, in 1861, he joined the army commanded by General Pierre Beauregard and served for four months as a chaplain with the 18th Virginia Volunteers (Chad Vanderford, “Proslavery Professors: Classic Natural Right and the Positive Good Argument in Antebellum Virginia,” Civil War History 55, no. 1 [March 2009]: 26). He could write about seeing “the puffs of smoke mount up from opposing cannon, and…the bayonets of the enemy gleam as their columns advanced” (quoted in Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 239-40). In 1862, Dabney became a combatant when he accepted the offer of General Thomas Jackson to serve as Adjutant-General of his army. In “The Minister, the Martyr, and the Maxim: Robert Lewis Dabney and Stonewall Jackson Biography” (Civil War History 49, no. 4 [December 2003]: 354), Wallace Hettle writes, “The two men’s wives were first cousins.” This position as Adjutant-General meant that Dabney became Jackson’s secretary and therefore accompanied him in all his movements, marches, and battles. He served with such distinction that Jackson called him “the most efficient officer” that he knew (Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 272).
3. Sean Michael Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney: A Southern Presbyterian Life (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2005), 13. Kelly observes, “From the time of his death in 1898 until the early 1960s, Dabney’s work was largely eclipsed in his own denomination, not to mention the wider church” (“Robert Lewis Dabney,” 37).
4. Kelly, “Robert Lewis Dabney,” 53.
5. Sean Michael Lucas, “Southern-Fried Kuyper? Robert Lewis Dabney, Abraham Kuyper, and the Limitations of Public Theology,” Westminster Theological Journal 66 (2004): 180. Dabney “read as widely in politics and science as in philosophy and theology” (Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 563).
6. “Dabney at first opposed the idea of secession as impractical, and he sharply castigated…South Carolina, for rebel-rousing” (Charles Reagan Wilson, “Robert Lewis Dabney: Religion and the Southern Holocaust,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89, no. 1 [January 1989]: 81).
7. Robert L. Dabney, “Christians, Pray for Your Country,” vol. 2 of Discussions: Evangelical and Theological (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), 397.
8. Dabney, “Christians, Pray for Your Country,” 397.
9. Cf. Merrill Mathews, “Robert Lewis Dabney and Conservative Thought in the Nineteenth-Century South: A Study in the History of Ideas” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Dallas, 1989); Francis B. Simkins, “Robert Lewis Dabney: Southern Conservative,” Georgia Review 18 (Winter 1964): 393-407.
10. Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians, 87.
11. Lucas makes this point in his essay “Southern-Fried Kuyper?” (181).
12. Hettle, “The Minister, the Martyr, and the Maxim,” 353.
13. Hettle, “The Minister, the Martyr, and the Maxim,” 355.
14. Dabney asserted that “the Reformed Protestant theology reached its zenith in the seventeenth century” (“The Doctrinal Contents of the Confession—Its Fundamental and Regulative Ideas, and the Necessity and Value of Creeds,” in Memorial Volume of the Westminster Assembly, 1647-1897 [Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publications, 1897], 92).
15. Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 240.
16. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 5.
17. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 1:542.
18. Henry F. Bedford and Trevor Colbourn, The Americans: A Brief History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 140.
19. Bedford and Colbourn, The Americans: A Brief History, 140.
20. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1985), 214. Robert W. Swierenga states, “The Democratic party from its inception in the 1820s espoused egalitarian…goals. The Democrats were social levelers” (“Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Voting, Values, Cultures,” in Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present, ed. Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 151).
21. Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant: A History of the Republic, 3rd ed. (Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1966), 256.
22. Robert L. Dabney, Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1985), 863-64.
23. Mark A. Noll, George M. Marsden, and Nathan O. Hatch, The Search for Christian America (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Helmers and Howard, 1989), 77.
24. I argue in this essay that Dabney reflects a Whig political cast in opposition to Jacksonian democracy in the second party system. With respect to the first party system, he admired Thomas Jefferson. In the third party system, Dabney voted for the southern Democratic candidate John C. Breckinridge (Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 106).
25. American Presbyterianism divided in 1837 between the New School and the Old School. While New School Presbyterianism embraced a modified Calvinist theology, the Old School insisted upon close adherence to the theology of the Westminster Standards.
26. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “Inductive and Deductive Politics: Science and Society in Antebellum Presbyterian Thought,” The Journal of American History 64, no. 3 (1977): 706. Glyndon Van Deusen recognizes that Jacksonian democracy entailed “the rising of the masses against aristocratic rule.” Furthermore, “the movement was a rising of the masses in support of one who symbolized for them the virtue, the essential ‘rightness’ of the common man” (Glyndon G. Van Deusen, “Some Aspects of Whig Thought and Theory in the Jacksonian Period,” The American Historical Review 63, no. 2 [January 1958], 305).
27. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 37. Allen C. Guelzo notes one of the reasons why the United States was moving ever more toward democracy. The territories in the West wanted to qualify for statehood as soon as possible. “To do that, they had to meet requirements for minimum number of voters. That…created pressure in the West to lower eligibility requirements for voting because the more voters who could be counted, the faster a territory could advance to the privilege of statehood” (Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], 11).
28. Robert L. Dabney, “Civic Ethics,” vol. 3 of Discussions (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1982), 113.
29. The Democratic theorist George Bancroft believed that “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), 419.
30. Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 564.
31. Dabney, “Civic Ethics,” 110.
32. Carl E. Prince, “The Great ‘Right Year’: Jacksonian Democracy and Patterns of Violence in 1834,” Journal of the Early Republic 5, no. 1 (Spring 1985), 8.
33. Bailey, The American Pageant, 256.
34. Dabney, “Civic Ethics,” 111.
35. In “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Swierenga points out that the Democratic party with Andrew Jackson as its “titular head” believed that “the highest good was universal male suffrage” (151). The Whig party was more “elitist.”
36. Swierenga, “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” 125. In “Some Aspects of Whig Thought and Theory in the Jacksonian Period,“ Van Deusen draws attention to the “Whig editors of the American Review” who “repeatedly declared that self-government and popular suffrage were not natural rights.” They contended that they were “privileges and, ideally speaking, should be exercised only by those possessed of property and intelligence” (309).
37. Bailey, The American Pageant, 420.
38. Wyatt-Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners, 215.
39. Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 305.
40. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 868.
41. Bozeman, “Inductive and Deductive Politics,” 707.
42. Dabney, “Civic Ethics,” 113.
43. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 33.
44. Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 557.
45. C. Gregg Singer, A Theological Interpretation of American History, 3rd ed. (Greenville, S.C.: A Press, 1964), 155.
46. James Oscar Farmer makes a similar point when he admits that Thornwell’s conservatism was “the product of” a “skeptical view of human nature, inherited in part from Calvin” (The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell [Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986], 155).
47. Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 67.
48. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 865.
49. Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.20.8. Guelzo links republicanism with the Enlightenment (Fateful Lightning, 10). He asserts, “Republicanism in the eighteenth century was the political fruit of the Enlightenment.” I am arguing that American republicanism has deeper roots and should be linked with the Calvinist Reformation. John T. McNeill argues that Calvin was a “political republican.” His republican principles were reflected both in his doctrine of the church and in his doctrine of the state. There is a “close parallel between Calvin’s conceptions of church polity and of the structure of political government” (“Calvin Preferred Representative Democracy,” in Calvin and Calvinism, ed. Robert M. Kingdon [Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Company, 1970], 32, 34). People who embraced Calvin’s ecclesiastical republicanism were prepared to accept the same republican ideal in the sphere of civil polity. The spread of Calvinism into nations has always had political implications. C. Gregg Singer comments upon this phenomenon: “It has brought with it an almost irresistible urge to create a government which would be patterned after that of the Reformed and Presbyterian churches” (John Calvin: His Roots and Fruits [Greenville, S.C.: A Press, 1994], 42). At the time of the Revolutionary War, the American population numbered approximately three million people; perhaps two out of three people came from a Reformed background (Douglas F. Kelly, The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World: The Influence of Calvin on Five Governments from the 16th through the 18th Centuries [Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1992], 120). Can there be any doubt that ecclesiastical republicanism impacted the civil arena? Referring to the Constitution of 1787, Singer asserts, “It is no accident that the birth of the Republic coincided with the appearance of the national Presbyterian Church” (John Calvin, 43).
50. McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 70.
51. McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 71.
52. Dabney, “Christians, Pray for Your Country,” 397-98.
53. In his “Second Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln affirmed that the Civil War had come “in the providence of God” and that “he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the due to those by whom the offense came.” He then drew attention to the offenses connected to American slavery, referring to “the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” and “every drop of blood drawn with the lash” (Classics of American Political and Social Thought, vol. 1, Origins through the Civil War, ed. Scott J. Hammond, Kevin R. Hardwick, and Howard L. Lubert [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007], 1117). Guelzo observes that American slavery was “a far more brutal and ruthless system of labor organization than the slaveries of the dim past” (Fateful Lightning, 30). He makes the point that “such brutality toward other human beings…departed dramatically from anything Protestant Americans could read concerning slavery in their Bibles.” As incredible as it may seem, many white Christian southerners maintained that “American slavery was a properly Christian institution” (Luke E. Harlow, “Slavery, Race, and Political Ideology in the White Christian South before and after the Civil War,” in Religion and American Politics; From the Colonial Period to the Present, ed. Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 204). Dabney clearly took the same view. Lucas writes, “When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, Dabney lost mastery of thirty-three slaves—twenty-seven that belonged to his mother and six of his own” (Robert Lewis Dabney, 31).
54. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 107.
55. Dabney, “Civic Ethics,” 109.
56. Robert L. Dabney, “The Christian’s Best Motive for Patriotism,” vol. 2 of Discussions: Evangelical and Theological (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 407.
57. Dabney, “The Christian’s Best Motive for Patriotism,” 407.
58. Clement Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization, 1790-1860 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), 275.
59. Steven J. Keilor, This Rebellious House: American History and the Truth of Christianity (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 1996), 127-49.
60. John H. Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 35.
61. Dabney, “The Christian’s Best Motive for Patriotism,” 407.
62. Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 305.
63. Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 304.
64. Dabney, “The Christian’s Best Motive for Patriotism,” 410.
65. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2:28.
66. Dabney, “The Christian’s Best Motive for Patriotism,” 410.
67. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 862.
68. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 862-63.
69. Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan,” in William Ebenstein and Alan Ebenstein, Great Political Thinkers: Plato to the Present, 6th ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 2000), 365.
70. Hobbes, “Leviathan,” 866.
71. Hobbes, “Leviathan,” 863. Writing about Dabney, Vanderford asserts, “The theology professor refused to believe that God ever granted humans ‘such independency’” (Vanderford, “Proslavery Professors,” 28).
72. Jean Jacques Burlamaqui (1694-1748), of Italian descent, was born in Geneva. He graduated from the University of Geneva and eventually became a professor of natural and civil law there at the age of twenty-five. His two-volume work, Principes du droit naturel et politique, was published in 1747.
73. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 863.
74. Robert L. Dabney, “The Christian Soldier,” vol. 1 of Discussions: Evangelical and Theological (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), 614.
75. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 863.
76. Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Johnson, 307.
77. Dabney, “Christians, Pray for Your Country,” 393.
78. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 864.
79. Robert L. Dabney, “Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights,” vol. 3 of Discussions
80. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1982), 22.
81. Dabney, “Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights,” 22.
82. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 880.
83. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 874.
84. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 875.
85. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 879.
86. Dabney, “Civic Ethics,” 120.
87. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 874.
88. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 869.
89. Dabney, “The Christian Soldier,” 616.
90. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 72.
91. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 874-75.
92. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 874.
93. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 869.
94. Dabney, “The Christian Soldier,” 614.
95. Dabney, “Christians, Pray for Your Country,” 397.
96. Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 236.
97. Guelzo asserts, “Although the Constitution forbade Congress from singling out any particular religion or religious denomination as a national ‘established’ church, it was nevertheless clear that Americans in all parts of the country overwhelmingly favored Protestant, evangelical Christianity.” He adds, “There were many differences between various groups of evangelical Protestants, and they organized themselves more separate and subdivided denominations…than there were states. But one thing they had in common was a commitment to the basic outline of evangelical piety—a direct appeal to the person of Jesus Christ as God, the experience of conversion from unbelief or half belief to fervent piety, a reverence for the authority of the Bible, and an ambition to promote the conversion of others for their own good and the good of the larger society” (Fateful Lightning, 9).
98. Walter Berns, Taking the Constitution Seriously (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 167.
99. Berns, Taking the Constitution Seriously, 168.
100. McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 43. “Since the First Amendment at that time applied only to the federal government, prohibiting only Congress, and not the states, from interfering with ‘the free exercise’ of religion, the states felt free both to maintain establishments and to legislate in religious matters. Not only did Connecticut and Massachusetts continue their tax-supported Congregational establishments, but the Revolutionary constitutions of Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia authorized their state legislatures to create in place of the Anglican Church a kind of multiple establishment of a variety of religious groups, using tax money to support the Christian religion” (Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 583).
101. Dabney, “Civic Ethics,” 121.
102. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 885.
103. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 884.
104. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 884.
105. Dabney, “Christians, Pray for Your Country,” 397.
106. See as an example of this Theodore Beza, Concerning the Rights of Rulers over Their Subjects and the Duty of Subjects towards Their Rulers, ed. A. H. Murray, trans. Henri-Louis Gonin (Capetown: H.A.U.M., 1956), 64, 66, 84.
107. Beza, Concerning the Rights of Rulers…, 83.
108. Robert M. Kingdon, “The Political Resistance of the Calvinists in France and the Low Countries,” Church History 27 (1958): 226.
109. Dabney would not only have rejected the Genevan model of the sixteenth century but also the New England holy commonwealth model of the seventeenth century. “Most New England Puritans came to these shores not to establish religious liberty, but to practice their own forms of orthodoxy…. Beyond any doubt they meant to narrow, not expand, the religious options available to people in seventeenth-century England” (John M. Murrin, “Religion and Politics in America from the First Settlements to the Civil War,” in Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present, ed. Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow, 2nd ed. [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 24). He then remarks, “They succeeded. Outside of Rhode Island, religious belief and practice became far more uniform in early New England than in the mother country of the same time.”
110. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 869.
111. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 876-77.
112. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 878.
113. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 879. In this sense, Dabney reflected something of the perspective of George Washington. Wood draws attention to the fact that Washington went a significant step further by attending the services of various denominations, including Congregational, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, and even Roman Catholic: “He expressed toleration for all religions, including the religions of Muslims and Jews” (Empire of Liberty, 584).
114. Dabney, “Civic Ethics,” 114.
115. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 542-43.
116. Wood notes that five of the original state constitutions—New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia—“required officeholders to be Protestant. Maryland and Delaware said Christians. Pennsylvania and South Carolina officials had to believe in one God and in heaven and hell; Delaware required a belief in the Trinity” (Empire of Liberty, 583).
117. Dabney, “Civic Ethics,” 120.
118. Dabney, “Christians, Pray for Your Country,” 399.
119. Dabney, “The Christian’s Best Motive for Patriotism,” 409.
120. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 862.