Scholarship devoted to Old Columbia Seminary and its individual theologians has covered a variety of topics, but has not focused on the efforts of the Old Columbia divines to counteract Unitarianism and stand for historic Trinitarianism in the nineteenth-century American South. This dissertation asserts that understanding the debate between the Old Columbia Trinitarians over against the Unitarians is crucial for any adequate interpretation of nineteenth-century Southern religious history and that within that debate the Old Columbians successfully turned the tide against Unitarian advances. These conclusions are reached by examining the three main “theatres” of the conflict between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism in the nineteenth-century American South: the theatre of Columbia, South Carolina, where Columbia theologian James Henley Thornwell (1812–1862) laboured to reverse the Unitarian advancements made there by Thomas Cooper (1759–1839), the president of South Carolina College; the theatre of Charleston, South Carolina, where Columbia pastor-scholar Thomas Smyth (1808–1873) sought to repel the Unitarian movement led by Samuel Gilman (1791–1858), the minister of the Unitarian Church of Charleston; and the theatre of New Orleans, Louisiana, where Columbia divine Benjamin Morgan Palmer (1818–1902) attempted to counteract the Unitarianism popularized there by Theodore Clapp (1792–1866), the pastor of the Unitarian Church of New Orleans. The contemporary relevance of the Old Columbians' efforts is also demonstrated.

This thesis is a study in the history of ideas which discusses the work and thought of the Unitarian biblical critic, classical historian and philologist John Kenrick (1788-1877). It examines evidence to suggest that during his productive life Kenrick made an intellectual transition from the ideas of the radical English Enlightenment to the more Romantic perspectives of the nineteenth century. The first part of the discussion as a whole is concerned largely with the nature of the context from which Kenrick emerged as a thinker while the second is related to Kenrick’s own changing ideas. Chapter two reveals the monist philosophical and theological tendencies which supported the Socinian beliefs of the polymath Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), who was the dominant influence on Unitarians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This discussion of Priestley’s thought, which is brought into relief by means of a comparison with that of the moral and political philosopher Richard Price (1723-1791), has two objectives, the first to reveal something of the context of Unitarianism of the time and the second to establish a foundation from which the nature and extent of later intellectual change may be measured. Chapter three concentrates on another aspect of the Unitarian context closely connected to Socinian beliefs, and that is the tradition of historical biblical criticism which contained the seeds of a new historical consciousness. The fourth chapter is an analysis of the relationship between these radical Unitarian biblical critics and scholars in Germany and discusses some similarities and differences between the two sets of thinkers. Chapter five focuses upon John Kenrick himself and the integration of his Unitarian historical biblical ideas with elements of German thought on the interpretation of classical myth. It points out the implications for his own ideas in terms of the development of Romanticism and cultural relativism. Chapter six is concerned with Kenrick’s historical approach to language and shows how it may be compared with the ideas of the German philologists of the time. The seventh chapter is an account of Kenrick’s opinions on the truth of Genesis and the origins of man. It considers in what ways the uneasy relationship between theology and the science of the mid-nineteenth century helped to bring about changes in his thought which linked it to a transformed Unitarianism and also to the intellectual milieu of the later nineteenth century. Chapter eight concludes the thesis with an assessment of the nature and extent of the changes which had taken place since the domination of the ideas of Joseph Priestley. The thesis offers a study of the transition in thought of an eminent scholar whose work has never been examined before. It opens up some new perspectives with regard to the linkages between the radical English Enlightenment and the historical consciousness and Romanticism of the nineteenth century.