Southern sensibilities prior to the Civil War are often underlooked and misrepresented as a one-dimensional justification of slavery. James O. Farmer’s The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values sketches an intellectual history of the Old South while also exploring Thornwell’s theology and views on slavery. Characterizing him as both a product of his society and a key player in it, Farmer asserts that his subject is a perfect window into the leading debates and controversies of the antebellum South. Through Thornwell, the book also highlights the Old South’s often-understudied intellectual prowess and depth of belief.

Farmer believes that Thornwell epitomized Calvinism, with its belief in humankind’s total moral depravity, and “can be seen as the prototype of Deep South religious thought.” He stresses that the prominent theologian’s beliefs, representative of the Southern mind, were formed in reaction to, and against, the modernizing forces that shaped the North. Northern society had become focused on economic progress and worldly success, whereas the South rejected what it viewed as the excesses of modern science, and saw a common bond among humans not in their abstract rights but the equalizing burden of universal sin. Farmer argues that this disjuncture between the North and the South developed into an irreconcilable civilizational struggle, and Thornwell’s beliefs were indicative of the predominant sense of Southern identity that preceded secession.

A key focus of Thornwell’s writings was the proper role of reason. Thornwell believed that the North’s unwavering commitment to reason, especially applying it to Scripture, was a folly because it denied man’s terribly flawed nature. “To prefer the deductions of philosophy to a Divine revelation,” he wrote, “is to relinquish the sun for the stars.” Reason, stemming from the mind of a morally fallen creature, was itself flawed. And Thornwell believed there were incomprehensible truths – divine truths – that the intelligentsia of the North wrongly believed they could prove or disprove with their minds alone. He further believed reason was in danger of going beyond its rightful place by intellectualizing all matters, infringing upon the supernatural realm by undermining the validity of divine revelations. But insistence on a firm split between the natural and the supernatural did not mean, in his case, a rejection of science and reason, as some scholars have asserted. According to Farmer, Thornwell thought “divine revelation was an ongoing process,” meaning that man would continue to learn new truths.

Thornwell believed that while many truths from Scripture should be self-evident, reason could observe things that are confirmed although not made explicit by God’s word: “The supernatural is that which alone is strictly and properly revelation; the natural is confirmed, but not made known, by divine testimony.” But reason was still an inherently flawed tool, and humans were “doomed to drudge in a humbler sphere [where] we are content to know of the external world just what our senses reveal, of the world within us [only] what reflection can bring to light, and of the world above us what the inspiration of the Almighty may vouchsafe to impart.” Here Thornwell espouses a blend of empiricism and skeptical scientism – not pure rationalism – that Farmer believes stemmed from the Scottish “Common Sense” philosophy and Baconianism that in his view were predominant in the South.

This epistemology was part of a larger body of Southern values disconnected from those of the North. By the 1850s, the divide between the regions was not only political but philosophical, with neither side able to understand the other’s ideals; people in the two societies inhabited different mental universes. Farmer maintains that Thornwell was instrumental in shaping a Southern orthodoxy, criticizing his society from within but also bringing what he believed were its principles together in a synthesis that was intended to spiritually strengthen the South. Thus he helped to create a “metaphysical Confederacy” – a Southern nation of the mind – that preceded secession and the Confederate States of America.

Farmer argues that in cultivating this Southern cosmology, Thornwell was quintessentially conservative. He applies the skepticism toward the North’s emphasis on science and rationality to the political realm, asserting that it led Thornwell to conclude that the South needed to insulate itself from the larger world in order to protect its intellectual and cultural heritage against what he thought were radical modernizing forces. Viewing society as an organism, he espoused a unique sociology that sanctified the community over the individual (while acknowledging that individual morality was crucial to collective decency).

Thornwell is not, however, remembered mainly for his expansive epistemology or his novel sociology; instead, much of the scholarship on him stresses his regrettable defense of slavery. Farmer explains Thornwell’s ambivalence about slavery as a theologian and his position that the churches should stay out of political and social issues, which he maintained until secession became inevitable. Thornwell’s view of slavery owed much to his conservative disposition and his focus on maintaining social order. “If Adam had never sinned and brought death into the world, with all our woe,” he claimed, “the bondage of man to man would never have been instituted,” and Earth was not meant to be a paradise free of suffering. Rather, Thornwell contended that due to man’s fallen nature – the same depravity that degraded reason – slavery was destined to exist, along with sickness, suffering, and death.

Thornwell also believed that slavery should be judged, on a case-by-case basis, by how masters individually treated their slaves. He sought to ameliorate slaves’ conditions while maintaining the institution, which he considered part of the social order. Often acknowledging that in a saved or redeemed world slavery would not exist, Thornwell posited a version of the Golden Rule which commanded masters to “give unto your servants that which is just and equal.”

Thornwell’s cerebral defense of slavery was, according to Farmer, part of a larger epistemological framework that was lodged deeply in the South’s mind before the Civil War. His book expertly analyzes Thornwell’s writings, adding nuance and context to the theological and ecclesiastical debates of his time. In doing so, it adds another dimension to the antebellum South. Through Thornwell, Farmer reveals how the South conceptualized much of its opposition to the North, how it approached various philosophical questions characteristic of the modern age, and how it questioned some aspects of slavery while also unfortunately justifying it.