The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) carries a name that describes an ending rather than a beginning. Twice in its history American Presbyterians divided over the country's deepest wound, and once, more than a century later, they came back together.
The first division came in 1861. As the Confederate states seceded, Presbyterians within them withdrew from the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America rather than remain bound to a body that would not endorse the southern cause, forming what eventually took the name Presbyterian Church in the United States, commonly shortened to PCUS. The northern body carried on under its own name until 1958, when it merged with the United Presbyterian Church of North America, a smaller denomination with its own separate nineteenth century roots, to form the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, or UPCUSA.
For 122 years after the Civil War split, the northern and southern Presbyterian traditions developed along separate, sometimes divergent paths, differing at times on questions of biblical interpretation, ecumenism and social witness as much as on the memory of secession itself. Reunion talks gathered pace through the 1970s, and on 10 June 1983 delegates meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, voted to reunite the UPCUSA and the PCUS as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), closing a division that had outlasted the war that caused it by more than a century.