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W oodRow WilSon’s uncle, James Woodrow (1827–1907), was a staunch Presbyterian, a firm believer in the “divine inspiration of every word” in the Bible, and a self-proclaimed advocate of its “absolute inerrancy.”1 Ironically, it was also his fate to find himself immortalized on the side of the scientific angels over against the benighted forces of religion in Andrew Dickson White’s famous History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. What secured his canonization in White’s gallery of scientific martyrdom at the hands of religious obscurantism was his dismissal in 1886 from the professorship he had held for over a quarter of a century at the Southern Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, on account of his views on Darwin’s theory of evolution. Exulting in the “self-condemnatory” declarations of Woodrow’s assailants, White echoed the sentiments of a “thoughtful divine of the Southern Presbyterian Church” who judged the actions of the church authorities to be “vicious and suicidal.” Their tactics amounted to using “dynamite . . . to put out a supposed fire in the upper stories of our house”—with “all the family” still inside!2 In the June 1894 issue of Popular Science Monthly, White had already staged the Woodrow affair as a “striking” illustration of how the Origin of Species had thundered into “the theological world like a plow into an ant-hill” and how its guardians “who were thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused.”3 The whole affair has been described as “the greatest controversy the Presbyterian Church, U.S., has ever known.”4 It was a grand public spectacle, which, at the time, made headline news. The New York Times, under the banner “Woodrow ’s Heresy Trial,” reported that the “largest congregation so far of the General Assembly” gathered for the hearing.5 The southern correspondent for the New York Observer told his readers that Columbia had no use for “tadpole theology” of the type that Woodrow was broadcasting—an evident reference to human evolution from primitive life forms.6 As Dr William Adams, one of the leaders for the prosecution in its later stages, announced during the heated exchanges: “Then another long period intervenes, and they get a tad-pole . . . and this little fellow C h a P t e r f i v e ♦ ♦ ♦ Columbia, Woodrow, and the Legacy of the Lost Cause 118 Dealing with Darwin somewhere, somehow gets ashore, and that, Mr Moderator and members of the assembly, was the landing of your ancestor.”7 To the Springfield Daily Republican, which reported the story, “Mr Adams’ humor was the humor of the insolent and his fear of science the fear of the ignorant.” Not everyone agreed. Whereas this correspondent was sure that it was only “unread and ill-informed exhorters” who saw in “the discovery of a grand and beautiful law in the natural world any menace to pure morals or religion,”8 the General Assembly that convened in Columbia in 1888 detected in evolution an infidel canker that would rot the entire fabric of southern culture. By contrast, to Woodrow’s yet-to-be-famous presidential nephew, Woodrow Wilson, the whole episode bordered on the burlesque. Writing from Johns Hopkins, where he was carrying out graduate work, Wilson told his fiancé Ellen Axson in June 1884: “If Uncle J. is to be read out of the Seminary, Dr. McCosh ought to be driven out of the church, and all private members like myself ought to withdraw without waiting for the expulsion which should follow belief in evolution. If the brethren of the Mississippi Valley have so precarious a hold upon their faith in God that they are afraid to have their sons hear aught of modern scientific belief, by all means let them drive Dr. Woodrow to the wall.”9 Figuring out just what was at stake in this drama with its serpentine twists and turns is our quarry in this chapter. These machinations expose how Darwinism was constructed in and around the dispute over evolution at the Columbia Seminary during the final decades of the nineteenth century and what was believed to be in jeopardy if evolution’s empire were to expand in Dixie. Tadpole Theology on Trial The immediate cause of Woodrow’s undoing was the stance he had adopted in a lecture he delivered in 1884 to the Alumni Association of the Columbia Seminary . Suspicions about Woodrow’s attitude to Darwinism...

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