The State of the Country

The State of the Country is an essay by Charles Hodge, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and editor of the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, published in that journal in January 1861. It was written in the weeks after Abraham Lincoln's election, when South Carolina had seceded and other Southern states were following. Hodge, a Presbyterian and a committed Unionist, wrote as a pastor-theologian addressing a nation coming apart, and he did so in a journal read mostly by ministers and educated laypeople who looked to Princeton for guidance on public questions as well as doctrinal ones.

The essay is an argument about what a nation is and what citizens owe it. Hodge denies that the Union was a mere compact that any state could dissolve at will. He holds that the Constitution created a government with its own sovereignty, to which the citizens of every state owe direct allegiance. Secession, on this view, is not a lawful remedy for grievance but revolution, and revolution can be justified only by intolerable oppression, which Hodge does not find in the election of a president by constitutional means. He also reasons from the consequences, warning that if states may withdraw whenever aggrieved, the Union can never be secure, and that the dissolution of the country would bring ruin on North and South alike. Alongside the constitutional case he makes a moral appeal, urging Southern readers to weigh what they would be throwing away and calling the North to patience and fairness. Throughout, he treats political duty as part of Christian duty, ordered by obedience to lawful authority.

The essay has lasting interest as a record of how a leading Reformed theologian reasoned about the state, loyalty, and conscience at the moment of national crisis. It shows the Princeton mind applied to public life, and it also shows the limits of that mind. Hodge's Unionism was real, but his treatment of slavery in this period, in which he did not call for its abolition, is part of the historical picture and deserves honest reading rather than either hagiography or dismissal. Students of American Presbyterianism, church and state, and the religious background of the Civil War will find here a clear and representative statement of the Old School position.

Who should read this: readers of American religious and political history, and those interested in how Reformed Christians have thought about civil authority, will find it rewarding. It is not a work of devotion or spiritual formation in the usual sense, and anyone looking for a timeless meditation on faith will find a document tied closely to its moment. Readers expecting a moral critique of slavery from Hodge will not find one here.