Challenges on the Emmaus Road: Episcopal Bishops Confront Slavery, Civil War, and Emancipation

By T. Felder Dorn

While slavery and secession divided the Union during the American Civil War, they also severed the Northern and Southern dioceses of the Protestant Episcopal Church. In Challenges on the Emmaus Road, T. Felder Dorn focuses on the way Northern and Southern Episcopal bishops confronted and responded to the issues and events of their turbulent times.

Prior to the Civil War, Southern bishops were industrious in evangelizing among enslaved African Americans, but at the same time they supported the legal and social aspects of the "peculiar institution." Southern and Northern bishops parted company over the institution of slavery, not over the place of blacks in the Episcopal Church. As Southern states left the Union, Southern dioceses separated from the Episcopal Church in the United States.

The book's title was inspired by the Gospel of Luke 24:13-35 in which the resurrected Jesus Christ walked unrecognized with his disciples and discussed the events of his own crucifixion and disappearance from his tomb. Dorn perceives that scriptural episode as a metaphor for the responses of Episcopal bishops to the events of the Civil War era.

Dorn carefully summarizes the debates within the church and in secular society surrounding the important topics of the era. In doing so, he lays the groundwork for his own interpretations of church history and also provides authentic data for other church scholars to investigate such topics as faith and doctrine, evangelism, and the administrative history of one of the most important institutions in America. Dorn devotes the final chapters to the postwar reunification of the Episcopal Church and Southern bishops' involvement in establishing the Commission on Freedmen to offer help with the educational and spiritual needs of the recently emancipated slaves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643362960

T. Felder Dorn

Felder Dorn is the author of two books published by the University of South Carolina Press: The Guns of Meeting Street: A Southern Tragedy (2001), and Challenges on the Emmaus Road (in press), about the role of Episcopal Bishops in the Civil War era. A native of South Carolina, Dr. Dorn’s professional career included service on the chemistry faculties of The University of the South in Sewanee, TN, and Kean University in Union, NJ, as well as serving as a dean and vice president at Kean.

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PART 1

Historical Background

The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States

A Sketch of the Years before 1860

The parent of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States was the Anglican Church or Church of England, members of which were among the English immigrants who had come to America during the colonial period. On the eve of the Revolution, there were about two hundred fifty Anglican clergy in the thirteen colonies. These ministers served an approximate combined total of three hundred organized congregations and missionary stations. More than half of the clergymen were in Maryland and Virginia. The ministers in charge of Anglican churches were men who had been ordained in England. Many clergy in the North were missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.¹ All Anglican clergy in the American colonies had subscribed to a solemn vow of loyalty to the English king, the head of the Church of England. Most of these clergy, in fact, remained loyalists, which resulted in tension between the rector and patriot members within congregations and in difficulty between the rector and community members who favored independence.² Some clergy were persecuted, others were driven out of the community, and many Anglican clergymen simply departed, seeking refuge in Canada, England, or, in some cases, New York, which British forces held for most of the war.

An issue in the Southern colonies, especially in Maryland and Virginia, was that the Anglican Church was established, receiving financial support derived from special taxes levied by the colonial legislatures; some of these funds were used for clergy salaries.³ During the war, colonial legislatures were pressured by those favoring the Revolution to disestablish the Church of England. In 1779 in Virginia the legislature did, in fact, abolish the taxes that formerly had been remitted to the church vestries. Other legislatures took similar action as the Revolution wound down. A related issue was that the Anglican Church had been given public lands in states in which it was established; ownership of church property therefore became a matter of controversy when independence was achieved.⁴

When the war ended, what had been the Anglican Church in the colonies was in disarray and dissension and faced a dearth of both fiscal resources and clergy.⁵ Besides the problems arising from the war and its aftermath, a pre-Revolution difficulty had become critical, namely the absence of resident bishops to ordain, guide, and support the clergy. Prior to 1776 some nominal supervision had been supplied by the bishop of London. With independence, the need for real oversight and assistance had intensified. Most pressing was the fact that new clergymen to replace the depleted prerevolutionary corps were needed. The only feasible way to build the required indigenous group of clergy was to have resident bishops by whom ordinations could be administered and who could approve assignments for clergy who wished to become part of the new American church.

Church leaders emerged in New England, the middle colonies, and in the South to try to solve these problems and to organize a new Protestant Episcopal Church based on Anglican beliefs and doctrines that could continue in the United States. Among the leaders were clergymen Samuel Seabury of Connecticut, Samuel Provost of New York, William Smith of Maryland, William White of Pennsylvania, and Robert Smith of South Carolina, four of whom later became American bishops.⁶

The church in Connecticut elected Samuel Seabury as bishop in 1783 and sent him to England to be consecrated. A requirement for consecration, however, was subscribing to an oath of allegiance to the king. This, Seabury, of course, could not do. He traveled to Scotland, where bishops in the nonjuror line were willing to consecrate him.⁷ He returned to Connecticut in 1785 as the first American bishop. In 1787 William White and Samuel Provost were consecrated in England as bishop of Pennsylvania and bishop of New York, respectively, the English Parliament having passed an act that permitted American bishops to be consecrated.⁸ Now that there were three bishops on American soil, the requisite number to hold a consecration rite, all that was needed for an American church to function independently, therefore, was creation of an organizational structure and governance rubrics. The inability of the three bishops to work in unison, however, retarded that initial step.

Both White and Provost were low churchmen and both had favored the American cause in the Revolution. White, in fact, had served as chaplain to the Continental Congress. During the war Provost was the lone Anglican minister in New York City who supported the Revolution.⁹ Seabury was a high churchman and was openly a loyalist during the war, at one point having written some Tory propaganda. He also had served as a chaplain to a British regiment.¹⁰ Provost was strongly opposed to Seabury and his consecration by nonjurors; Provost appeared unwilling to cooperate with Seabury in establishing a unified American church or in consecrating new bishops.

The church in New England and the church in the Middle and Southern states both were planning governing rubrics for a national church, but the two branches did not meet together. A barrier in addition to Provost’s antipathy toward Seabury was that Seabury was concerned that Middle and Southern states’ organizational plans for the new church included the laity and did not afford bishops a strong enough role. William White recognized that unity was essential if an American church were to be formed, and it was his diplomatic skills and maneuvers that brought the two factions together.

In 1789 there were two sessions of a general convention involving Episcopal dioceses in the United States. The first session was held from 28 July through 8 August 1789 and was attended only by representatives from Southern and Middle states, to wit: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia. Bishop White was there, but Samuel Provost was prevented by illness from attending.¹¹

During the meeting Bishop White succeeded in getting the convention to acknowledge explicitly the validity of Seabury’s bishopric and in winning approval for other measures to placate the Connecticut bishop, namely making provision for a House of Bishops and making lay representation at General Convention an option for each diocese.¹² Another important action that occurred at the first session concerned the "Act of the Clergy of Massachusetts and New Hampshire in the election of the Reverend Edward Bass to the episcopate." This act was transmitted to the convention by the Reverend Dr. Samuel Parker of Boston with the request that the three bishops, Seabury, Provost, and White, join in the consecration of Dr. Bass. The convention followed its affirmation of the validity of Seabury’s consecration with a request by formal resolution that Bishops White and Provost unite with Bishop Seabury to consecrate the Reverend Dr. Bass.¹³

These actions all were communicated to Bishop Seabury, with the result that he and clergy representatives from Connecticut, as well as Dr. Samuel Parker, who represented the clergy of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, attended the second convention session from 30 September through 16 October. The Connecticut bishop came prepared to work for a unified church.¹⁴

Bishop Provost’s reaction to the actions of the first session was antithetical to that of Bishop Seabury. The New York bishop was invited to preach the opening sermon at the second session; he declined, and, though recovered from his illness, refused even to attend when the convention reconvened in September. He rejected the convention’s appeal to unite in a service with White and Seabury to consecrate Dr. Bass and was displeased with the New York delegation for giving its sanction to such an arrangement.¹⁵ Episcopal Church historian James Thayer Addison summed up the New York bishop’s behavior, saying that Provost sulked in his New York tent while the business of a vital convention transpired.¹⁶

When the 1789 convention ended, there was in place a constitution, a set of canons, and a prayer book. The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (PECUSA), with nine charter dioceses, scilicet Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina, was established.¹⁷

Although Bishop White had no doubts about the validity of Seabury’s consecration and very much wanted to see the two lines (Scottish and English) unite to consecrate a bishop on American soil, he was concerned about offending the archbishop of Canterbury and the other English bishops who had consecrated both Samuel Provost and himself in 1787. That consecration had been intended to provide three American bishops in the English line, but one bishop-elect, Dr. Griffith of Virginia, had withdrawn before the consecration could take place. White felt that there was a tacit understanding that three English Line bishops would be resident in America before there was a consecration performed by bishops in the American church.¹⁸ Provost’s intransigence probably eased White’s discomfort over the deferral of action on the request of Dr. Parker.

Then, in 1790, James Madison was consecrated in England as bishop of Virginia, and there were three English line bishops in the United States. In 1792, again as a result of the mediation efforts of William White, the four American bishops, Seabury, White, Provost, and Madison, joined in a consecration to elevate Thomas Claggett to the episcopate of Maryland.¹⁹ An American line of succession with roots to both the English church and the Scottish nonjurors was in place.

Dr. Bass withdrew his name as a bishop-elect after the 1789 convention. He was later re-elected, however, and in 1797 was consecrated by Bishops White, Provost, and Clagget. Bass served as the second bishop of Massachusetts and the first bishop of Rhode Island until his death in 1803.²⁰

The 1792 convention opened in New York on 11 September, in accord with the constitutions and canons adopted in 1789. In 1789 Bishop White was the presiding bishop from 28 July until the constitution was adopted in October, at which point Seabury, as senior bishop, presided in the House of Bishops. In the interest of unity, however, the seniority rule was rescinded in 1792, and a rotation system adopted, thereby putting Provost in the presiding bishop’s chair for that convention.²¹ Bishop White took the chair at the 1795 convention. Seabury died in 1796, and Provost resigned his episcopate in 1800.²² Although Provost’s resignation was not accepted by the House of Bishops, an assistant bishop was consecrated, and Provost never again functioned as bishop. In 1804 the seniority rule was restored and remained in place until presiding bishops began to be elected in the 1920s.²³ William White served as presiding bishop until 1836.

The new Episcopal Church went through some hard times in the next few decades after its founding, and the General Conventions in the early 1800s do not reflect a robust church.²⁴ Structure and governance rubrics were in place for the new institution, however, and a leadership cadre developed. Bishops such as William Hobart in New York, Alexander Griswold in New England, Philander Chase and Charles McIlvaine in Ohio, John Ravenscroft in North Carolina, James Otey in Tennessee, Jackson Kemper for the Northwest, Leonidas Polk for the Southwest, Stephen Elliott in Georgia, and Alonzo Potter in Pennsylvania came to the episcopate to pursue aggressively the expansion of the church. The road to a watershed convention at Richmond was paved with their achievements.

At the time of its General Convention in Richmond in October 1859, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America could claim more than 139,000 communicants, 2,065 clergy, more than 1,400 church edifices, and 2,120 parishes (organized congregations). These parishes were administratively housed in 34 domestic dioceses, each one presided over by a bishop.²⁵ Within many dioceses, especially the ones located in frontier states, there were mission stations served either by missionary clergy or parish rectors who were willing to undertake additional responsibilities. The church also supported domestic missionary bishops for United States’ territories (in what are now the lower forty-eight states) not yet organized as dioceses. Foreign missions in China and Africa were headed by missionary bishops.

From the beginning the American Episcopal Church boasted many members influential in government, a characteristic that was still true in 1859.²⁶ It was also a church with a significant number of members from the upper class. Episcopalian wealth was perhaps most obvious in the South, where many plantation owners (and hence large slaveholders) were churchmen.

An important area in which the Episcopal Church was not a leader was membership, in which it lagged well behind other major Protestant denominations. The small membership was particularly significant in states permitting slavery in that, as will be described in subsequent essays, taking the gospel to slaves was considered part of the church’s mission. Of the 139,411 communicants for the United States in 1859, 25,563 were in dioceses in states that would join the Confederacy.²⁷ By contrast, The American Ecclesiastical Handbook reported 994,620 Regular Baptists for the United States, 486,826 of whom were in states that would secede, and about 1,700,000 Methodists for the United States, approximately 500,000 of whom were in states that would secede. There were 66,864 old School Presbyterians in the states that would secede, and approximately 700,000 Presbyterians of all types in the United States.²⁸

In the years covered by this study, the U.S. Census did not survey for numbers of members or communicants, but it did gather data on the number of church buildings. In 1850, for example, the U.S. Census recorded a total of 29,007 church edifices for the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians; of these buildings, 1,493 or just under 5.2 percent belonged to the Episcopal Church. This edifice index for the Episcopal Church was highest in the Northern free states, being 6.2 percent slightly lower (5.9 percent) in the four slave states that did not secede, and only 3.3 percent in the eleven states that eventually formed the Confederacy. In the latter group of states, the 1850 census reported a total of only 395 Episcopal structures, a number that had risen to 524 by 1860.²⁹

Notes

1. Samuel Wilberforce, A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America (London: James Burns, 1844), 173. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was founded by royal charter at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Its original focus was on possessions of Great Britain, and it served both colonists and the people native to the area. See Henry Offley Wakeman, An Introduction to the History of the Church of England: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 10th ed. (London: Rivingtons, 1923), 410.

2. In his History of the Protestant Episcopal Church Wilberforce states that no Anglican minister north of Pennsylvania supported the Revolution, but he estimates that about one-third of the Anglican clergy in the South were on the side of the patriots. According to William Wilson Manross in A History of the American Episcopal Church (New York: Morehouse-Gorham, 1950), 175–201, loyalty to the Crown varied by colony. He agrees with Wilberforce that in Maryland and Virginia only about one-third of the Anglican clergy supported the Revolution but claims that in South Carolina the patriot cause was favored by a three-to-one margin among Anglican ministers. James Thayer Addison, in The Episcopal Church in the United States, 1789–1931 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), 52, concurs, except that he reports that in Virginia two-thirds of the Anglican clergy supported the patriot cause.

3. Wilberforce, History of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 173, and Robert W. Prichard, A History of the Episcopal Church (Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 1991), 80.

4. G. MacLaren Brydon, Memorial on Proposed Disestablishment of the Church in Virginia, 1776, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 2 (March 1933): 48.

5. The surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781 effectively ended the fighting, but the formal end of the war came in 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. Writing in 1906, George Hodges, Three Hundred Years of the Episcopal Church in America (Philadelphia: Jacobs, 1906), 78, made a pithy summary statement in reference to the impact of the Revolution on the former Anglican Church in the United States: The Church was almost destroyed.

6. See Journals of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, 1785–1835, ed. William Stevens Perry, vol. 1, 1785–1821 (Claremont, N.H.: Claremont Manufacturing, 1874), for accounts of various meetings that occurred from 1784 to 1786 and that in 1789 culminated in the establishment of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.

7. The line of nonjuror bishops began in 1688 when James II was forced to abandon the throne and William III of Orange and his wife Mary (the daughter of James II) became king and queen of Britain. The clergy in Scotland, including the bishops, refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary on the grounds that they had previously taken an oath of allegiance to James II, which was binding until James II died. The label nonjurors (non-swearing) was applied to these bishops. The new monarchs decreed that the Anglican Church was no longer the state church in Scotland and replaced it with the Presbyterian Church. The Scottish bishops, however, were in the line of apostolic succession, and perpetuated the nonjuror line. Swearing loyalty to the occupant of the British throne was not a requirement for consecration, and hence Seabury sought and was granted consecration by the nonjuror bishops. See John Moorman, A History of the Church in England (London: Adam and Charles Beck, 1953), and Prichard, History of the Episcopal Church.

8. Prichard, History of the Episcopal Church, 86.

9. Addison, Episcopal Church in the United States, 52.

10. Prichard, History of the Episcopal Church, 88.

11. Journal of a Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the States of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, Held in Christ Church in the City of Philadelphia, 28 July to 8 August 1789, in Journals of the General Convention, ed. Perry, 63–90.

12. Ibid., 71. The convention passed unanimously the resolution stating that it is the opinion of this convention, that the consecration of the Right Reverend Dr. Seabury to the Episcopal office is valid.

13. Charles Comfort Tiffany, A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1895), 370–73.

14. Tiffany, History of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 375–76.

15. Ibid., 373, 376.

16. Addison, Episcopal Church in the United States, 68.

17. New Hampshire was at first part of the Diocese of Massachusetts and did not have its own bishop until 1844. See Journal of the Proceedings of the Protestant Episcopal Church in a Convention held in Philadelphia, 29 September to 16 October 1789, in Journals of the General Convention, ed. Perry. The canons are printed on pages 125–30.

18. Tiffany, History of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 373.

19. Journal of the Proceedings of the Protestant Episcopal Church in a Convention held in City of New York, 11–19 September 1792, in Journals of the General Convention, ed. Perry, 164–65.

20. List of the Bishops of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Episcopal_bishops_(U.S.). (Accessed 7 January 2013).

21. Journal of the Proceedings of the Protestant Episcopal Church in a Convention held in City of New York, 11–19 September 1792, 145–79.

22. Journal of the Proceedings of the Protestant Episcopal Church in a Convention, 1801, in Journals of the General Convention, ed. Perry, 257–88.

23. Journal of the Proceedings of the Protestant Episcopal Church in a Convention, 1804, in Journals of the General Convention, ed. Perry, 289–322.

24. The state of the early church in Virginia is noted briefly in the essay William Meade and John Johns of Virginia, below.

25. Journal of the General Convention, 1859 (Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1860), 317. A glossary of terms pertaining to the Episcopal Church is provided in Donald S. Armentrout and Robert Boak Slocum, An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church: A User-Friendly Reference for Episcopalians (New York: Church Publishing, 1999).

26. George Washington was an Episcopalian. In the first U.S. Congress (1789–1791), thirteen of the twenty-nine senators and twenty-four of the sixty-six house members were churchmen, representing a much higher membership percentage than any other denomination. Religious Affiliation of the Senators and Representatives in the First United States Congress, http://www.adherents.com/gov/congress_001.html (accessed 1 July 2007). There also were Episcopalians within the Confederate government and military, including President Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee.

27. Journal of the General Convention, 1859, 318. Four states in which slavery was legal did not secede. The Journal of the General Convention, 1859, reported 14,905 communicants in those states.

28. Alexander Schem, The American Ecclesiastical Year Book: The Religious History and Statistics of the Year 1859 (New York: H. Dayton, 1860), 34, 41, 47. The estimate of Presbyterians of all types is taken from The World Almanac 1868, Commemorative Edition (New York: Pharos Books [Scripps Howard], 1992), 61. All statistics, except for Episcopal communicant data, are estimates, presented here only to show that the Protestant Episcopal Church had a small fraction of the Protestant church membership both in the United States as a whole and in the South.

The U.S. Census in 1890 did survey for membership data. These were compiled and the collection methods explained in the following work: Department of the Interior, Report on Statistics of Churches at the Eleventh Census 1890 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894). The data in this publication show clearly that in 1890 the Episcopal Church was a distant fourth in membership, behind the Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians.

29. Historical Census Browser, Geostat Center, University of Virginia Library, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/ (accessed 1 November 2006). The edifice index was constructed as a rough index of membership share.

Slavery in the United States

A Brief History

The international slave trade existed long before the thirteen colonies were founded in North America. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Portuguese ships were removing Africans from their native continent to sell as slaves in Europe.¹ In the sixteenth century the economies of the Spanish empire in the New World and the Portuguese colony in Brazil began to create large demands for slaves. Slave labor was used extensively in agriculture, especially on sugar cane plantations, and later in other pursuits, such as gold mining in Brazil.² Portuguese sea captains dominated the slave trade at first, but later the Dutch, and then the English, became the major participants. Other European countries such as France participated to a lesser extent.³

The establishment of colonies by countries other than Spain on the east coast of North America in the 1600s opened a new opportunity for slave traders. Slavery began in these colonies when a Dutch man-of-war sold twenty Africans to the English colonists at Jamestown in 1619.⁴ In 1636 the Desire, the first slave ship, or slaver, built in the colonies, was launched in Marblehead, Massachusetts.⁵ The locus of the trade from colonial ports, however, shifted to Rhode Island, from which 934 voyages were made in the period from 1700 to 1807. These ships brought from Africa a total of more than 106,000 slaves, but only a fraction of these were landed in colonial ports, the others being taken to ports in the West Indies, including Cuba.⁶ European slavers continued to dominate the trade. Of the eleven to twelve million people enslaved and removed from Africa during the three to four centuries of the slave-trading era, about 800,000 or 850,000 were brought to what is now the United States.⁷

Those enslaved in Africa were sometimes seized directly by slave-ship forays up coastal rivers, but far more often they were purchased from other Africans, usually from a local king or chieftain who had secured slaves through tribal warfare or kidnapping raids on villages not in his jurisdiction. Slaves were purchased with rum, cloth, gunpowder, and other goods. The unfortunate captives bought by a ship captain were held in slave-holding pens or forts called barracoons near the coast until the slaver had sufficient human cargo to set sail. Once the ship had reached its destination, the slaves were sold, becoming the property of their masters and forced to labor at assigned tasks. In British North America there was a much higher concentration of slaves in the Southern colonies than in the Northern ones. Although a number of slaves were taught to manage household tasks and some were trained in other pursuits, the majority worked in agriculture, especially in the rice, indigo, and tobacco fields of the South. Some slaves in the North worked on farms, but as the 1700s progressed it became clear that Northern agriculture and the Northern economy generally were not well suited for the profitable use of slaves. The disparity between regions with regard to the need for slaves was greatly magnified when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin just after the Revolution. Indigo production shifted to India after the war, but the market for cotton appeared limitless. The nation became one with two economic systems, one dependent on slave labor and the other not.

After the Revolution, for which the Declaration of Independence was the document of justification, the discussion of slavery as a moral issue intensified. The debate would go on for many decades, but from the outset, at least to some, the spectacle of a nation founded on principles of liberty and equality sanctioning by law the enslavement of a race of people was a grotesque contradiction. Starting with Massachusetts, Northern states began taking action to abolish slavery.

The first year that a census was taken in the United States was 1790, by which time only the thirteen original colonies had become states. The table below provides a comparison of the magnitude and locations of slavery in the United States in 1790 and 1860. Massachusetts in 1790 no longer had slaves within its borders, but there were 681,777 slaves in the other twelve states. Of the states in which slaveholding was permitted, four were states that would later join the Confederacy, and eight would remain Union states. Slavery was abolished by state action in six of those eight states long before the Civil War. By the time of the 1860 census there were 3,950,311 slaves in the fifteen states that still permitted slavery, eleven of which seceded to form the Confederate States. The New Jersey entry of eighteen slaves for 1860, while technically correct, was an aberration that resulted from the wording of that state’s earlier emancipation action. There were large numbers of slaves in Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, and although the citizens of these states were sharply divided over secession, all three states remained in the Union. Delaware, with only a small number of slaves (1,798) followed the same course.

In March 1807 both Houses of the Congress voted to outlaw the Atlantic Slave Trade, effective 1 January 1808, an action already taken by Great Britain. The opening section of the act set forth its key stipulation:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the first day of January, one thousand eight hundred and eight, it shall not be lawful to import or bring into the United States or the territories thereof from any foreign kingdom, place, or country, any negro, mulatto, or person of color, with intent to hold, sell, or dispose of such negro, mulatto, or person of color, as a slave or to be held to service or labor.⁸

Lack of enforcement made the law banning U.S. participation in the external slave trade at first mostly symbolic. Enforcement was gradually strengthened, however, and the United States began in the 1840s to cooperate with Great Britain worldwide to suppress the slave trade. For a time both U.S. and British naval squadrons patrolled the west African coast to interdict slave ships.⁹

While importation of slaves into the United States was declared illegal, the internal or domestic trading of slaves flourished openly for most of the fifty-three years immediately preceding the Civil War.¹⁰ By 1860 the eight hundred thousand or more slaves that had been imported into the United States during the Atlantic slave trade had grown to nearly four million. Most of the slaves in the United States in 1860, therefore, had been born there. The domestic trade was a mechanism to move slaves from areas where there was a surplus of slave labor into areas of high need. The other mechanism was for a slaveholding family to move with the family slaves from one state to another. During the decade of the 1850s, there were seven states into which more slaves entered than departed and eight states from which more slaves departed than entered. The complete breakdown is shown in the following table.

The top state in the first (net entry) category is Texas, a state that had entered the Union only in December 1845 and which had experienced a huge jump in slave population since 1850. Texas is followed by Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, all of which had a net-entry estimate in excess of twenty-five thousand for the decade. The large demand for increased slave labor in those four states was fueled by the great expansion of the cotton crop into the Deep South and the Southwest. All seven states had maintained a positive net-entry figure since achieving statehood, but this figure had peaked in a prior decade for all except Texas, Arkansas, and Florida.

In those states in which more slaves left the state than entered, Virginia’s estimate for 1850–1859 had exceeded eighty thousand. Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware had shown decade deficits since 1790; the latter two states, as shown in the first table above (Number of slaves by state, 1790 census and 1860 census), had experienced an actual drop in the slave population. North Carolina had been a source of slaves for other states since the decade beginning in 1800, as had South Carolina and Kentucky since 1820. Georgia and Tennessee, in contrast, had shown a positive net-entry figure through the decade 1840–1849.

Slaves were bought and sold in private transactions and also at public auctions, both in Upper South city markets and in markets in cities farther to the south and southwest. Slave traders, men who purchased and then resold slaves for profit, bought slaves in the former locations and sold them in the latter. Slaves were moved from one place to another in groups or coffles, which usually traveled on foot. Slaves generally were tied together to prevent escape. Very young slaves and mothers sometimes rode in wagons.

Associated with the domestic trade were two particularly shameful features of the institution of slavery. One was the separation of slave families, husbands from wives, children from parents, and siblings from siblings. Some owners did make an effort to buy or sell family units together, but the profit motive trumped other considerations. Owners having to sell slaves to satisfy creditors or to keep from losing their homes were not in a position to enforce a no separation policy.

Another shocking feature of the domestic trade was rearing slaves from babyhood to be sold for profit when they reached saleable age. Toward this end, slave owners in some states, particularly in the Upper South and especially in Virginia, fostered breeding by slave women. When these newborns had grown into young slaves, six to eight years in age,¹¹ many were among the slaves from slave-exporting states sold to meet the increasing demand for field hands and other workers in states to the South and West.¹² The home-grown labor pool comprised slaves who were already acclimated to the system and generally were healthy, factors which made them valuable and more desirable than slaves imported from Africa through the illegal Atlantic slave trade.

Two quotations from Frederic Bancroft’s work on slave trading give a perspective on rearing slaves for market. The first quotation is one of a series derived from Bancroft’s study of the words of descendants of slave owners.

Moncure D. Conway, whose father was a slaveholder near Fredericksburg, Virginia, wrote: As a general thing, the chief pecuniary resource in the border states is the breeding of slaves; and I grieve to say that there is much ground for the charges that general licentiousness among the slaves, for the purpose of a large increase, is compelled by some masters and encouraged by many. The period of maternity is hastened, the average youth of negro mothers being nearly three years earlier than that of any free race, and an old maid is utterly unknown among the women.

The stock farmer indifferent to enlarging his herd would be no more of an anomaly than was the planter that did not keep close count of his pickaninnies and rejoice in the profit that grew with them.¹³

Bancroft also includes and discusses an excerpt from an 1832 speech to the Virginia House of Delegates by Thomas Jefferson Randolph: The exportation of slaves from Virginia to other Southern States has averaged 8,500 [annually] for the last twenty years.… It is a practice, and an increasing practice in parts of Virginia, to rear slaves for market. How can an honorable mind, a patriot, a lover of his Country, bear to see this ancient Dominion.… converted into one grand menagerie where men are to be reared for market like oxen for the shambles?¹⁴ Although slavery had once prevailed in all thirteen original colonies, and the American participation in the Atlantic slave trade was centered in Rhode Island, conflict over slavery within Northern states and between Northern and Southern states was present from the start of the new republic.

The South vigorously advocated that the Union maintain a balance of slave states and free states, so that national legislation unfavorable to slave states could not be passed. The first of many congressional struggles over this issue began with the quest of the citizens of the territory of Missouri for statehood. Missouri was expected to enter as a slave state. After extensive debating and maneuvering, an agreement that became known as the Missouri Compromise was effected. Maine was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1820, and Missouri was admitted as a slave state in 1821. In addition, the southern border of Missouri, latitude 360° 30' west, extended westward would be the line north of which slavery was prohibited.¹⁵

In 1846 a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot attached an amendment to an appropriations bill associated with negotiations for a territorial settlement with Mexico following the Mexican-American War. This Wilmot Proviso would have excluded slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico. The bill passed the House of Representatives in two successive sessions but failed twice to pass the Senate. The debate was acrimonious and spilled over into the 1848 presidential election campaign. The determination and bitter feelings on both sides were intensified by the struggle over this proviso.¹⁶

In 1850 the issue of the extension of slavery into new states was confronted again, and this time it appeared to be a real possibility that the states in the South would leave the Union if an acceptable compromise could not be achieved. An agreement known as the Compromise of 1850 averted immediate crisis, but its terms included provisions that would lead to future discord. This compromise was actually a series of separate legislative acts. The key provisions insofar as the status of slavery was concerned were as follows:

The territories of New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah were free to organize. The decision as to slave state or free state would be made by the territorial inhabitants at the time of application for statehood.

The slave trade was abolished in Washington, D.C. (Slavery was allowed to continue, but the spectacle of a large slave market in the nation’s capital was removed.)

California was admitted to the Union as a free state.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed.¹⁷

Actions 2 and 3 were wanted by the North. Action 1 put the responsibility for slavery’s status in a state from the western territories on the prospective state’s inhabitants, a popular sovereignty model; this was seen as a gain for the South. Action 4 favored the South and in fact was put in the compromise to offset the admission of California to the Union.

The fugitive slave law of 1793 had weak enforcement provisions and often was simply ignored in the North. The 1850 act, however, was a strong law which stipulated that fugitive slaves must be returned to their owners and directed that the federal government assume responsibility for enforcement. The act provided for punishment of individuals who hindered the carrying out of the provisions of the law. Many escaped slaves living in the North fled to Canada for fear that federal marshals, under the provisions of the new law, might seize them. Committed abolitionists were outraged, and many others in the North felt that they were now complicit in protecting an institution in which they did not believe, and which, in fact, was prohibited in their states.¹⁸

Four years later the time had come to organize the Kansas-Nebraska territory. Prior attempts had met with Southern opposition, in that states created from that territory would be bound by the Missouri Compromise. Senator Stephen Douglas offered a bill that created two territories and that provided for popular sovereignty in the choice of free or slave when statehood was conferred. This proposal rescinded the Missouri Compromise and led to a prolonged, bitter debate in Congress, with antislavery forces vehemently opposed. With the support of President Pierce and continued activity on the part of Douglas, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law in May 1854.¹⁹

Both proslavery and antislavery settlers rushed into Kansas, each attempting to organize a government that could apply for statehood.²⁰ The result was bleeding Kansas, an extended period of violence between proslavery and free-soil factions that exacerbated the distrust and bitterness that already existed between North and South. Kansas eventually became a free state in January 1861, but by that time the Union had been severed and civil war was only months away. The action in Kansas furnished a man named John Brown and his sons with guerilla experience that he would draw upon later at Harper’s Ferry.

Before even the first of the legislative debates over the extension or containment of slavery had begun, there was movement at the grassroots to call for the end of slavery in the United States. Antislavery or abolitionist societies sprang up all over the country, although by the mid-1830s these had ceased to function in the South.²¹ Abolitionist leaders included Frederick O. Douglass, a former slave, who had become a powerful orator and uncompromising critic of those in the North who were willing to tolerate the existence of slavery in their country. Another prominent leader was William Lloyd Garrison, a Nova Scotia native who devoted his entire working life to abolitionism until slavery no longer existed in the United States. His weekly paper, the Liberator, was the chief vehicle by which his views were disseminated. Garrison was a longtime president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833 to promote the demise of slavery in the United States. By 1838 this society had 1,350 chapters and 250,000 members.²² Among those active in the movement were woman-suffrage advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband Henry. Women’s groups were responsible for many petitions delivered to Congress calling for an end to slavery. By far the most famous and effective antislavery publication was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly.

Abolitionist voices grew in number, intensity, and influence. Although they had not moved Congress to action, Southerners heard the increasing calls for abolition and observed the increasing militancy of its supporters. Abolitionist speeches, pamphlets, newspapers, and Stowe’s novel had, by the mid-1850s, certainly inspired anger and resentment in the South. More tangibly, slaveholders saw the effects of the assistance given by Northern citizens to the Underground Railroad and the growing resistance of Northerners to enforcement of the fugitive slave law.

Just over a month after Lincoln’s election in November 1860, South Carolina seceded. A last-minute effort in Congress to save the Union, a compromise proposed by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, repackaged elements of former compromises. His proposal comprised six proposed constitutional amendments and four proposed congressional resolutions. Although the vote was close in the Senate, the measure failed to pass in both houses in January 1861.²³ By the time the new president was inaugurated on 4 March 1861, seven Southern states had passed ordinances of secession and Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as provisional president of the Confederate States of America.

Notes

1. Dorothy Schneider and Carl Schneider, Slavery in America: From Colonial Times to the Civil War (New York: Facts on File, 2000), 3.

2. See Kathleen J. Higgins, Licentious Liberty in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth Century Sabara, Minas Gerais (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999).

3. Schneider and Schneider, Slavery in America, 16.

4. Clayton E. Jewett and John O. Allen, Slavery in the South: A State-by-State History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), 259.

5. Schneider and Schneider, Slavery in America, 15.

6. Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).

7. Estimates of the Africans removed and the number transported to North America during and after the colonial period vary; the figure reported here is derived from Schneider and Schneider, Slavery in America, 13.

8. Statutes of the United States Concerning Slavery, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School Library. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/statutes/slavery/sl004.htm. (Accessed 22 January 2013). This website has a copy of the entire act.

9. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), devotes an entire chapter to the enforcement problems in the first several decades after the United States outlawed importation of slaves. He also includes in appendix C, Typical Cases of Vessels Engaged in the American Slave Trade, a list of slavers and their locations documented during this period, some of which were taken into custody, some of which were not. According to Michael Tadman, in Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 11, and other authors, there were not large numbers of importations from Africa after the Atlantic trade became illegal. Certainly the major growth in the slave population did arise from slaves born in the United States, but it also seems clear that the United States was lax, in the opinion of Du Bois, in enforcing the proscription against importations.

10. Some states did for a time ban or restrict interstate slave trading. These restrictions were removed by most states, however, in the 1840s and early 1850s. See Schneider and Schneider, Slavery in America, 68–70.

11. By the time slave children were six to eight years old, they could be hired out (with the slave owner paid for the young slave’s labor) or sold. See Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J.H. Furst, 1931. Reprinted. New York: Ungar, 1959), 77.

12. John C. Reed, in The Brothers’ War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1905), 432, made the blunt statement that many of these older sections turned from being agricultural communities, into nurseries, rearing slaves for the younger states where virgin soil was abundant.

13. Bancroft, Slave Trading, 76–77. Bancroft quoted Conway from Moncure D. Conway, Testimonies Concerning Slavery (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865), 20.

14. Bancroft, Slave Trading, 60–70.

15. Jewett and Allen, Slavery in the South, 175.

16. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 34–36.

17. The Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act, Judgment Day (PBS Online website), Part 4, 1831–1865, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2951.html (accessed 17 July 2007).

18. Louis Filler, Crusade against Slavery: Friends, Foes, and Reforms, 1820–1860 (Algonac, Mich.: Reference Publications, 1986), 242–45.

19. See Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism, 45–65, for a discussion of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its consequences.

20. See also Bishops in the Slave States, below, the section on Cicero Stephens Hawks’s episcopate in Missouri in the bleeding Kansas years.

21. Schneider and Schneider, Slavery in America, 272.

22. Filler, Crusade against Slavery, 87.

23. The Crittenden Compromise is discussed in Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, its significance in American law and politics, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 545–50. A text of the compromise is provided at http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/critten.html (accessed 6 August 2007).

PART 2

Episcopal Bishops in the Antebellum Era

Preamble

When secession began in December 1860, there were sixteen bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church with jurisdictions in the fifteen states in which slavery was legal. The Episcopal Church in each of the eleven Southern states that eventually seceded was led by a bishop, and the Diocese of Virginia also had an assistant bishop. One of these eleven states, Arkansas, did not constitute a diocese, but the Right Reverend Henry C. Lay’s purview as missionary bishop for the Southwest encompassed that state. A bishop also led the church within each of the four slave states that were to remain within the Union.

In ten of the fifteen states the bishop serving in 1860 was the first Episcopal bishop for the diocese that was coterminous with that state. In those cases the bishop of necessity had to have as a primary concern the increase of communicants within his diocese. These bishops were heavily engaged in evangelism, in parish organizing, and helping to support church construction. Although the Atlantic states of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina had longer Episcopal traditions, the bishops in these states still had to devote much time to diocese building in 1860. Arkansas, as noted above, was part of Bishop Lay’s missionary district, and his charge was to provide Episcopal services while he encouraged formation of dioceses within the district.

The bishops in these fifteen states had to confront slavery not as an abstract question, but as a state-sanctioned institution right on their doorsteps that posed questions concerning the role their church should play with respect to the slaves in their midst. Bishops in states that did not permit slavery, as will be described, did not openly come to grips with slavery in the antebellum era.

Stephen Elliott of Georgia and Thomas Frederick Davis of South Carolina

Stephen Elliott

The Diocese of Georgia was established in February 1823, but many years passed before the new diocese could afford a bishop.¹ Stephen Elliott, its first bishop, was consecrated in Christ Church, Savannah, on 28 February 1841.² The new bishop simultaneously began his episcopate and assumed the rectorship of St. John’s Church in Savannah. Stephen Elliott set to work to develop his vast diocese, which encompassed a total population of 691,392, including 280,344 slaves.³ From the beginning Elliott saw his mission as bringing both white and black residents into Christ’s fold, and he felt that, in saving souls, race or status was of no importance. Given the social structure, however, including the fact that most slaves were on large plantations, there had to be tactical differences in the approaches used for the two races.

In building white congregations, Bishop Elliott started with 323 communicants and 6 parishes; 9 clergymen attended his first diocesan convention.⁴ His evangelical work, which included starting new churches, strengthening struggling ones, and visiting all congregations, continued until the Civil War. His efforts were augmented and reinforced as the diocese gained both fiscal and personnel resources. By 1850 there were 19 churches, 24 clergy, and 862 communicants.⁵ In 1860 there were 27 churches, 28 clergymen, and more than 2,000 communicants.⁶ When he died, an editorial in the Macon Telegraph praised the impact of Elliott’s missionary zeal during the first twenty years of his episcopate: when he entered upon the office of Bishop, Episcopalianism was scarcely known in Georgia beyond the walls of churches in Savannah and Augusta; he closed his labors with congregations in nearly every town of the State, with communicants numbered by thousands, and with thousands more pressing into the fold.⁷

In terms of the geographical spread of the Episcopal Church in Georgia, this editorial painted a true picture, but the reckoning of the number of communicants in the state was overstated. At the May 1861 diocesan meeting, the communicant total was reported by the Committee on the State of the Church as 2,184.⁸ This meeting marked the end point for Elliott’s diocese building effort, from which his attention was diverted by secession, church division, and war and its consequences.

Missions to Slaves and the Free Black Population

The 1861 communicant total included more than 500 black persons, most of whom were slaves, and one large mission on the Ogeechee River accounted for 357 of the latter.⁹ This major thrust of Elliott’s ministry had begun immediately after his consecration. At his first convention in May 1841 Bishop Elliott described visitations held earlier that spring. He reported on having preached several times to slaves during his very first episcopal visit, which was to Christ Church on St. Simons Island. He then made his first plea for slaves to be instructed in the Episcopal faith. There is no arrangement of worship so well qualified as ours, to meet exactly the wants of our colored population. What they need is sound religious instruction.… There are very few colored persons of the State of Georgia who have not within their reach, some kind of religious exercise, but it is, for the most part, a religion of excitement, occupied entirely with the feelings, while they need to be instructed in the first principles of the doctrine of CHRIST.¹⁰ He urged parish rectors to count and make a roll of slave children in their parishes and to arrange to instruct them in the faith.

At the 1843 convention Elliott directed a message both to slave owners and to clergy. He appealed first to the slave owners’ sense of duty: One-half, at least, of the large slave holders on the Savannah, the Ogeechee, the Altamaha, the Satilla, and the sea islands which skirt the coast of Georgia are Episcopalian, and it is time they wake up to their responsibilities in this matter.¹¹ For the clergy and potential deacons, he presented both an opportunity and a challenge: But it is useless to arouse the Planters to their duty so long as the Ministers of the Church and her candidates for orders shut their eyes to the vast work which is here spread out before them. From this city [Savannah], we can look out upon, at least, ten thousand slaves whose masters are, for the most part, willing that they should be religiously instructed—willing to pay that they might be instructed.… and yet among all that vast multitude there is not heard the voice of a single pastor.¹²

The bishop then noted that the problem’s scope was even wider but went on to commend the effort being made near the Altamaha River by St. David’s, a tiny church in Glynn County: From the bluff at Darien, there are to be seen plantations containing 5000 slaves, and St. David’s is the first Episcopal Church that has offered the glad tidings of great joy to their greedy ears.¹³ The officiating minister at St. David’s, the Reverend Dr. John Vaughan, reported that he was attempting to serve some 1,000 to 1,200 slaves and that the coloured people evince a growing attachment to the services of the Episcopal Church.¹⁴ Elliott praised Vaughan’s work and the support given by the five planters who had built the church. This effort adumbrated a model that Elliott soon implemented.

Missions on the Ogeechee and Savannah Rivers

In 1845 Bishop Elliott provided a missionary for the slaves who were working the land on several plantations by the Ogeechee River. Charles Lwanga Hoskins, historian of black Episcopalians in Georgia, points out that this was a significant departure from precedent, because for the first time the church was setting up a work entirely for the slaves and not simply as an adjunct of a white parish.¹⁵ Elliott appointed to the new Ogeechee Mission his student and protégé, the Reverend William C. Williams. Williams, a young deacon, twenty-four years old, faced alone a truly staggering task. His initial reception by the slaves, many of whom viewed him as an agent for the owners, was not cordial, and his first priority was to establish credibility with those whom he wished to proselyte.¹⁶ By the time of the 1846 diocesan meeting, however, Williams had made progress: I entered upon my duties … on the First Sunday in Advent [1845]. I am engaged by several planters to labour among their Negroes. There are not a dozen whites within the limits of the parish, so that my whole time is devoted to the Blacks. I have had service twice on Sunday, besides a weekly lecture, alternating between the different plantations …; on each of the plantations, schools have been established for the oral instruction of the children.¹⁷

Williams reported that there were a total of eighty children attending the schools. He was pleased with the pace at which they were learning and added that for permanent success among an ignorant people my chief hope must be in the young, and if they are neglected or only partially instructed, no lasting good can be experienced. The Liturgy has been introduced as fast as possible. The Negroes seem much interested in the responsive part of the service, and I am convinced the constant use of the Liturgy among them will be of the greatest benefit.¹⁸ Williams reported to the diocese in 1852 that he was serving seven plantations. These plantations lie contiguous, and cover an area of six miles long by three miles wide. Within this space there are between 1,000 and 1,500 souls.¹⁹

In January 1852 the Reverend R. W. Kennerly began the Savannah River Mission with a model similar