An excerpt from  

BISHOPS, BOURBONS, AND BIG MULES

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN ALABAMA

FROM THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT

 

BY

 

J. BARRY VAUGHN

 

 

Copyright ã J. Barry Vaughn (2007)

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

The Episcopal Church in Alabama has roots deep in Alabama’s colonial past when clergy of the Church of England served the spiritual needs of the garrison at Fort Charlotte in Mobile between 1763 and 1780. The formal beginning of the Episcopal Church in Alabama, however, may be dated from the founding of Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, in 1828, or the organization of the Diocese of Alabama in 1830.[i]  The legacy of Anglicanism in Alabama is a rich one: The Episcopal Church in Alabama has produced distinguished bishops and priests who have served their people and the wider community faithfully and well and in some cases have acquired national reputations. Episcopalians in Alabama claim a proud tradition of eloquent and intelligent preaching, faithful pastoral care, and innumerable works of mercy.  Many of Alabama’s governors, senators, members of Congress, university professors, and other civic leaders have been Episcopalians and have served the church as lay leaders.

This study of the Episcopal Church in Alabama proceeds from two convictions: First, the Episcopal Church, although small, exercises influence out of proportion to the size of its membership. Greenough White, the biographer of Alabama’s first Episcopal bishop, Nicholas Hamner Cobbs, wrote, “  . .the Episcopal was the slaveholders' church . . .it was in fact the church of a class.”[ii] White’s remark may seem pejorative, but the fact that the Episcopal Church was the church of the slaveholders meant that it was also the church of Alabama’s political, economic, social, and cultural elite. Kit and Frederica Konolige put it well at the conclusion of their book The Power of Their Glory, a sociological study of the Episcopal Church:

[The Episcopal Church] was . . .the cause of great opportunity in the United States, the foundation of public service, of a massive tradition of private support of irreplaceable public institutions, the root of much that was best in political thought and practice. . . .

 

To a large degree it produced, like it or not, America.[iii]

 

In Alabama as elsewhere in the United States, the lay leaders of the Episcopal Church set the political, economic, social, and cultural agenda. To paraphrase the Konoliges, “To a large degree, the Episcopal Church produced, like it or not, Alabama.”  The second conviction is that there have been three great turning points in the history of the Episcopal Church in Alabama: the 1830s, the 1870s, and the 1950s. At each point, the church grew rapidly and the state fundamentally changed. In the 1830s, the Diocese of Alabama was founded. It was not only a time for organizing the church but also for organizing the state, and in many cases the same individuals were at the highest levels of both the church and the state. In the 1870s the state industrialized rapidly, and new churches were founded in Alabama’s industrial boomtowns of Birmingham and Anniston. The political and economic power of the Bourbons (the Black Belt planters) passed to the Big Mules (Governor Bibb Graves’ phrase for the industrialists), and the leadership of the state and the diocese shifted decisively from Mobile and the Black Belt to the “mineral region” of Birmingham and north Alabama. The Black Belt churches went into decline while the state’s newly rich industrialists filled the pews of the Church of the Advent and St. Mary’s-on-the-Highland in Birmingham and Grace and St. Michael’s in Anniston. Although Alabama’s economic foundation had shifted from agriculture to industry, the Episcopal Church continued to be the church of the elite by attracting the new industrial leadership. In other words, the Big Mules were just as likely to be Episcopalians as the Bourbons had been. In the 1950s the post-World War II “baby boom” was a primary cause of a pan-denominational church building boom. In this decade St. Luke’s, Mountain Brook, was organized and quickly became a “cardinal” parish of the diocese. Other churches founded in the 1950s were Ascension, Vestavia Hills, and St. Stephen’s and St. Thomas in Huntsville. Alabama changed dramatically in the 1950s with the coming of the civil rights’ movement that ultimately brought African Americans the civil rights they had been denied for more than 300 years. Alabama Episcopalians played critical roles in the great drama of civil rights, both constructive and obstructive.

The story of the Episcopal Church in Alabama is a story of a diocese that covered an entire state until it divided in 1970 and of the bishops that led it, but it is no less the story of parishes, large and small, and their struggles to survive and be faithful. It is the story of bishops, priests, and deacons, but the lay leaders greatly outnumber the ordained leaders and their commitment to the church sometimes outshines the clergy. The traditional way of doing denominational history focuses more or less exclusively on ordained leaders, institutions, theological trends, and so on. However, the Book of Common Prayer tells us that the ministers of the Church are “lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons,”[iv] and the story of the Episcopal Church in Alabama is as much the story of its lay people as it is the story of its clergy. As far as possible, this study will look at the role Episcopalian lay persons have played in the history of Alabama while still including the more traditional themes of denominational histories.

 

The story of the Episcopal Church in Alabama is not only about Bishops, Bourbons, and Big Mules; it is also about Emma Jones, a member Mobile’s Christ Church who went to China as part of the Episcopal Church’s mission to that country; it is also the story of Scottish immigrant Kate Cummings, who nursed wounded soldiers within earshot of Union artillery; more obviously, the story is about saintly Bishop Cobbs who prayed that he would not live to see Alabama secede from the Union and died the morning that the secession resolution passed. In the twentieth century the narrative must consider the Rev. Edgar Gardiner Murphy, who prophetically denounced child labor in the Alabama legislature; another character is Bishop William George McDowell who worked quietly to achieve justice for young black men falsely accused of rape in the infamous “Scottsboro case.” A highlight of the story is the founding of an order of deaconesses by Bishop Wilmer in the midst of the Civil War as a way to care for Confederate widows and orphans. And in the late twentieth century women, such as Alabama’s Mary Adelia McLeod, who was the first women in the Episcopal Church elected diocesan bishop; begin to play an even larger part in the story. This church of Bishops, Bourbons, and Big Mules has a proud heritage and can face the challenges of the 21^st century with confidence.

 

ONE

How Anglicanism Came to America

 

 

Long before there was an Episcopal Church, the Church of England began to establish itself in English settlements on the east coast of the North American continent. It has been said that Great Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absent-mindedness. A similar comment could be made about the Anglican Communion. The cross followed the flag, and wherever English colonists sought riches or adventure, the Church of England came along to minister to their spiritual needs. Thus a global empire spawned a global church.

Beginning at Jamestown in 1607, Anglican churches slowly and gradually began to appear wherever English men and women founded villages that grew into towns that ultimately became cities. Anglicans clustered somewhat thickly in Virginia the Carolinas, Maryland, New York and Connecticut, and were slightly less numerous in Puritan New England. Parishes were organized in Maryland and Virginia in the mid to late seventeenth century, and in 1686 Anglicanism penetrated even the Puritan stronghold of Massachusetts when King’s Chapel was founded in Boston.[v] Quaker William Penn’s “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania tolerated all Protestants and even welcomed Jews. Penn’s sons, Thomas, Richard, and John converted to Anglicanism but maintained their father’s principle of toleration. On the eve of the Revolution, there were twenty-two Anglican churches in Pennsylvania, including prestigious Christ Church, Philadelphia (1695).  The Church of England became the established church in New York in 1693. Four years later Trinity Church was organized in lower Manhattan and given a large grant of land. Trinity’s real estate holdings not only made it the wealthiest congregation of any denomination in the United States, it also enabled Trinity to support the extension of Anglicanism throughout the New York area. Thus, New York became “the launching stage for the spread of Anglicanism into Connecticut, New Jersey, and the developing area up the Hudson River.”[vi] In Virginia, closely tied to the Church of England from the beginning, the colonial assembly had established 107 parishes by 1784. Anglicanism flourished in Charleston and the surrounding tidewater region of South Carolina. The Anglicans in Charleston helped organize churches in nearby Savannah and Augusta, although Anglicanism was never as strong in Georgia as in South Carolina. John Wesley famously served as a missionary in Savannah in 1736.

However, the growth and health of Anglicanism in North America was hindered by the Church of England’s failure to provide episcopal leadership. American Anglicans were some three thousand miles from their episcopal authority, the Bishop of London. Ordination (even confirmation) required a difficult and dangerous sea voyage of several weeks. The Church of England lacked both the machinery and the vision to evangelize aggressively. Its bishops wielded ecclesiastical authority over large dioceses and at the same time served a political function in the upper house of Parliament as “Lords Spiritual.” The Church of England had created new dioceses after the Reformation (such as the Diocese of Oxford), but political obstacles made it impossible to send a bishop to North America. After 1688 the Bishop of London was given oversight of all North American Anglicans and was represented in the colonies by agents known as commissaries. The commissaries frequently served as rectors of large and influential churches, but their presence may have done more harm than good to the Anglican cause. Being in priestly rather than episcopal orders, they could perform only the most unpopular functions of the bishop they represented – enforce discipline and doctrine – and were unable to ordain, confirm, or provide the kind of strategic planning that American Anglicans needed.

In spite of its lack of episcopal leadership, American Anglicanism began to thrive in the eighteenth century. The Church of England’s strength differed from colony to colony, but Anglicanism was making steady gains until 1776. The Revolutionary War precipitated turmoil among American Anglicans. The British monarch was “supreme governor” of the Church of England; its liturgy included mandatory prayers for the King, and all clergy were required to vow loyalty to the Crown. Thus, all Anglicans, especially the clergy, were regarded as either potential or actual traitors to the American cause. Just over half of Anglican clergy in America remained loyal to the Crown, although the overwhelming majority of lay people favored independence.[vii] In spite of the close ties between the Anglican church and the Crown, many American leaders were more or less active as members of Anglican parishes. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Betsy Ross, and Francis Hopkinson at one time or another attended services at Christ Church, Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson contributed to the Anglican church on a regular basis, even though he had no use for Christian orthodoxy. Indeed, most of the Revolution’s leaders probably held views that are better characterized as Deist than Christian.[viii]

With the end of the War for Independence and the establishment of the United States, Anglicanism lost not only many of its clergy and some of its lay leaders, it also lost its favored position as the established church in several of the colonies. The (now former) Anglicans faced several challenges: First, they had to secure episcopal leadership. Second, they had to redefine themselves as one denomination among many in the new republic rather than the church by law established.. And finally, they had to recoup the losses they had suffered during the war.

The first task – securing episcopal leadership – was in some ways the least complicated, although it precipitated a crisis that threatened to divide the American church even before it was organized. In 1783 the clergy of Connecticut chose Samuel Seabury to be their bishop and sent him to England to seek consecration from bishops of the Church of England. However, the English bishops were bound by law to require new bishops to swear loyalty to the Crown, something that Seabury could not do. Thus, Seabury turned to the bishops of Scotland who did not demand that he swear allegiance to the Crown, and he was duly consecrated in Aberdeen on November 14, 1784.

The organizing convention of the Episcopal Church met in Philadelphia in 1785. The next two American bishops – William White, the rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia, and Samuel Provoost of Trinity Church, New York –successfully sought and received consecration from English bishops. However, White and Provoost regarded Seabury with suspicion and distrust. Seabury had been a loyalist; White and Provoost had been patriots. Seabury’s theological views were decidedly “high church;” White and Provoost represented the “low” or evangelical side of the church. If the two groups had not found a way to work out their difference, the American church might have been fatally weakened.

Delegates to the 1789 general convention hammered out a compromise that brought the two sides together and also gave the new church a name – the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.* Seabury favored the English model of ecclesiastical polity in which bishops wield enormous power, but White and Provoost favored a more democratic model in which lay persons would be involved in church governance. The compromise (probably influenced by the United States’ constitution) created a church with a bicameral structure: an upper house of bishops alone and a lower house composed of priests, deacons, and lay persons. The bishops the Episcopal Church would have the dignity of English bishops but not their enormous power. Like the American president, bishops of the Episcopal Church are constrained by checks and balances. They can articulate a vision, set priorities, and establish goals, but lay persons are involved at almost every level of decision-making.

At the 1789 general convention the Episcopal Church made great strides. It now had episcopal leadership, a workable polity, and a name. However, it had not yet established an identity that would enable it to compete in the religious marketplace of the new republic. The vision that ultimately prevailed was that of John Henry Hobart (1775-1830), who became assistant bishop of New York in 1811 and diocesan bishop in 1816. The theological position that Hobart articulated emphasized baptismal regeneration, apostolic succession, and sacramental grace. However, the most important aspect of the Hobartian synthesis for understanding the role that the Episcopal Church would (and would not) play in the United States generally and Alabama in particular was his conviction that the church was “a spiritual society possessing the faith, the order, and the worship which were the characteristics and glory of the primitive age of the Church” and thus must avoid political entanglements. Hobart write, “[T]hanks to that good Providence who hath watched over our Zion, no secular authority can interfere with, or control our high ecclesiastical assembly.”[ix]

The alternative to the Hobartian synthesis was evangelicalism. Leading evangelicals were William Meade, bishop of Virginia, and Charles Pettit McIlvaine, bishop of Ohio. Its intellectual leader was William H. Wilmer, faculty member at Virginia Theological Seminary and father of the future bishop of Alabama, Richard Hooker Wilmer. The main differences between the evangelical and high church wings of the PECUSA in the early nineteenth century were more about emphasis than substance. Both used the Book of Common Prayer, although many evangelicals pleaded for more flexibility in using the Prayer Book while high churchmen insisted on rubrical precision. Both parties accepted episcopal polity but some evangelicals regarded episcopacy as only one form of polity among many while high churchmen viewed it as a divine institution. Probably the most substantial differences between evangelical and high church Episcopalians in the early nineteenth century concerned their respective attitudes toward baptism and conversion. The evangelicals believed that baptism was “a badge of Christian profession; a symbol of regeneration; a covenanting and sealing act; and an evidence to the identity of the church…from generation to generation.”[x] However, the evangelicals, regarding scriptural truth as more important than church order, were among the few prophetic voices in the Episcopal Church in the early nineteenth century. The handful who spoke out against slavery were mostly evangelicals.  Among them were laymen William Jay and John Jay and the Reverends Alexander Crummell (an African American), Evan Johnson, John P. Lundy, and Thomas Atkins.

The challenge facing the PECUSA at the beginning of the nineteenth century was overwhelming: How to transmit the Christian faith in its Anglican form to a new republic already spreading westward to fill a vast continent?  In 1821 the PECUSA formed the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, and then radically re-organized it in 1835. Even though it was slow to begin evangelizing the American frontier, the Episcopal Church did not make the Church of England’s mistake and fail to provide episcopal leadership for its far-flung parishes. Thus, in 1835, Jackson Kemper was consecrated to serve as the first missionary bishop of the Episcopal Church and given responsibility for the northwestern frontier. He was soon followed in 1838 by West Point graduate Leonidas Polk who was charged with serving the southwestern frontier.[xi]

When the Diocese of Alabama was organized in 1830 it became a part of a church whose tradition linked it with the apostles but which was also an heir of the Reformation. It was a church that had withstood the chastening fire of the Revolutionary War and had adapted to the new reality of the American republic. The Diocese of Alabama was on the leading edge of the Episcopal Church as it began its westward march across the continent.

 

TWO

 

“No gentleman would choose any but the Episcopalian way”:

The beginnings of the Episcopal Church in Alabama

 

In eighteenth century Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, Anglicans worshiped in impressive churches, and could count governors, legislators, and wealthy merchants among their number. Although never as numerous as the more evangelical churches, Anglicans in the larger towns along North America’s east coast America’s larger cities still had respectably large congregations. From elegant wine glass pulpits, clergy educated at Oxford and Cambridge rehearsed the stories of the Bible and exhorted the faithful seated in their rented box pews to do their Christian duty.

There were no box pews, wine glass pulpits, or Georgian churches in Mobile, Britain’s distant outpost in the land that became Alabama, but in 1764, the year after Great Britain acquired Mobile from France as a result of the Seven Years’ War, an Anglican priest and the Book of Common Prayer accompanied the British troops who arrived to garrison Fort Charlotte. The Rev. Samuel Hart was the first chaplain to serve the spiritual needs of the soldiers at Fort Charlotte, but it seems he was not a great success. He preached “a lengthy and quite dogmatic sermon” to the Indians and “was utterly unable to impart any idea of his subject matter to his hearer.” Finally, the native chief cut him short and said, “Beloved man, I will always think well of this friend of ours, God Almighty, of whom you tell me so much; and so let us drink his health." Hart appears to have left Mobile in 1767, complaining that he had no parsonage, no church, and earned too little to support his family. He departed for the Carolinas and ended his days as rector of St. John’s Parish, Berkeley, South Carolina.[xii] The British authorities may have addressed some of Hart’s concerns, because Hart’s successor, the Rev. William Gordon, seems to have had both a house and a church, although they were probably burned during the Spanish assault on Mobile in 1780.[xiii]

After the Revolutionary War, Mobile passed first into the control of Spain and then back to France before being acquired by the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. When Alabama became a state in 1819, it may not have seemed a promising field in which to plant and grow Episcopal parishes.  Observers of the Alabama frontier found life there characterized by drunkenness and violence and were often appalled by the conditions under which people lived.

Most visitors to early Alabama were struck by the excessive use and abuse of alcohol. English author and temperance activist James S. Buckingham (1786-1855) visited Alabama in the late 1830s and observed “grog-shops of the common order … at every corner of almost every street.” “Hardly a night passes,” Buckingham wrote, “without a riot or a fight, or without furnishing an occasion for a duel or a murder at some subsequent time.”[xiv] Distinguished English geologist Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), visiting Alabama about the same time as Buckingham, also noted frequent episodes of public drunkenness. Not only did Lyell find his innkeeper drunk early in the morning, but while in Washington, he witnessed a congressman from Alabama “the worse for liquor, on his legs in the House…”[xv]

Even without the stimulus of alcohol, the Alabama frontier was a violent place. Naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, (1810-1888) who came to Alabama in the 1830s to teach school, observed  the “quarrelsomeness” and “recklessness of human life” in the South. “The terrible bowie-knife,” Gosse asserted “is ever ready to be drawn, and it is drawn and used too, on the slightest provocation. Deeds are fought with this horrible weapon, in which the combatants are almost chopped to pieces; or with the no less fatal, but less shocking rifle, perhaps within pistol-distance.”[xvi] While traveling downriver to Mobile, Leonidas Polk, (1806-1864) the Episcopal Church’s missionary bishop of the southwest, was deeply disturbed when he saw corpses floating on the river. Polk attributed this to

the shocking indifference to the value of human life, and the rights of the dead… Men are knocked overboard, and… boats… [are] blown up, by which many lives are every year lost, producing frequently nothing more than a fleeting show of sympathy, or an idle remark. I have, on more than one occasion, seen the bodies of the dead floating unnoticed among the drifting timber… These things ought not to be.  They betray a depravity dishonorable to us as a people…[xvii]

 

Not everyone found Alabama’s settlers to be rough, violent, and given over to vice. In 1838 a report in The Spirit of Missions (the official publication of the Episcopal Church’s Domestic and Foreign Mission Society) by “a gentleman of Lafayette, Chambers County,” described the Alabamians he knew as “comparatively moral and religious. Scenes of bloodshed are rare; a large proportion of the community are professing Christians.” But he went on to say that “religion …is mixed with some grossness, and ignorance, and party contention, and political feuds… and is especially apt to be so in an unsettled, prosperous, emigrant community…”[xviii]

These early observers of Alabama balanced criticism with praise. Most were impressed by the extraordinary hospitality of Alabama’s people.  Lyell found Alabamians interested in and eager to assist his hunt for fossils. The people he encountered were “hospitable and obliging to a stranger….”  and “each planter seemed to vie with another in his anxiety to give me information in regard to the precise spots where organic remains had been discovered.”[xix] Gosse praised the “generous, almost boundless hospitality, in the southern planter…”[xx] Most travelers also commented on Alabama’s natural beauty and extraordinary fertility.  Scottish author Alexander MacKay (1808-1852) claimed that Alabama “produces cotton and Indian corn in abundance…” and added that “Alabama is not surpassed, in point of fertility, by any of the sister States of the Confederation.”[xxi] Even before Alabama became a state, traveler Anne Newport Royall (1769-1854) wrote glowingly of the “astonishingly large” cotton fields in the Tennessee Valley near Huntsville. “Fancy is inadequate to conceive a prospect more grand! … To a stranger, coming suddenly amongst these fields, it has the appearance of magic. He is lost in wonder, and nothing but the evidence of his senses can persuade him it is reality.”[xxii]

Except in Mobile, travelers could not expect comfortable lodgings. Lyell was disconcerted by the practice of sharing a bed with another traveler: “I could have dispensed cheerfully with milk, butter, and other such luxuries; but I felt much the want of a private bed-room. Very soon, however, I came to regard it as no small privilege to be allowed to have even a bed to myself.” Even “wealthy and respectable planters,” wrote Gosse, lived in homes that were built  “of rough and unhewn logs, and to an English taste are destitute of comfort to a surprising degree.” However, Gosse also found other houses “much superior… regularly clapboarded, and ceiled, and two, or even three stories high, including the ground-floor” which contained “comforts and elegancies in them which would do no dishonour to an English gentleman.”  Nearly all travelers praised Mobile for its relative sophistication and often compared it favorably with New Orleans and the older, more settled metropolitan areas along America’s east coast. Buckingham was impressed by Mobile’s “four daily newspapers… two morning and two evening” and its “weekly literary gazette.” He also found that they were “all conducted with more than average talent…” According to Hungarian travelers Francis (1814-1897) and Theresa Pulszky (1815-?) Mobile’s gardens were “filled with roses, orange and lemon trees, and magnificent magnolias…” and found “the air full of fragrance.” “The main streets are long and broad,” wrote Mackay, “well shaded by trees, and admirably paved.” [xxiii]

Opinions differed about other Alabama towns. Most travelers found Montgomery unappealing. Buckingham thought it had “few distinguishing or prominent features…. The town consists principally of one main street of ample breadth, 100 feet at least, at the bottom of which is the Court House…” The Pulskys expected to be impressed by Alabama’s new capitol but instead found it “more grotesque than fine.” Mackay thought that Montgomery was “not calculated to leave so pleasing an impression upon the mind of the stranger as either Macon or Columbus.” As noted previously, Anne Newport Royall was much impressed by Huntsville, where, in 1818, she noted the presence of “260 houses, principally built of brick…a  bank, a court house and a market house.” Huntsville’s residents, she observed, came “mostly from Georgia and the Carolinas – though there are a few from almost every part of the world; -- and the town displays much activity. The citizens are gay, polite, and hospitable, and live in great splendor.” [xxiv]

European travelers to nineteenth century Alabama were insatiably curious about the institution of slavery. Almost unanimously, they condemned it, but their opinions differed about how great an evil it was and how it might be done away with. Lyell praised the churches for their outreach to slaves but recognized that evangelizing them undermined the institution of slavery. “…it is no small gain that he should simply become a member of the same church with his master, and should be taught that the white and coloured man are equal before God, a doctrine calculated to raise him in his own opinion, and in that of the dominant race.” Lyell witnessed no “mal-treatment [sic] of slaves in this State” but believed that the widespread drunkenness he observed meant, “the power [slaveowners] exercise must often be fearfully abused.” Gosse believed that slavery “helps to brutalize the character, by familiarizing the mind with the infliction of human suffering,” but he was reluctant to be too explicit about the evils he had witnessed because “there is a very stern jealousy of a stranger’s interference on these points.” The Pulszkys were struck by the fact that Southerners seemed so defensive about slavery. At a dinner party in Montgomery, their hostess raised the topic of slavery “in the very first moment of our acquaintance.” This was a pattern they found repeatedly in their travels. “…as they feel how much horror slavery inspires in Europeans, they wish at once to explain their position.” “What will be the end of American slavery?” Gosse asked.  He believed that it was “a huge deadly serpent, which is kept down by incessant vigilance, and by the strain of every nerve and muscle…” He concluded with these prophetic words: “…some day or other, it will burst the weight that binds it, and take a fearful retribution.”[xxv]

Isolated, violent and primitive though it was, religion flourished on the Alabama frontier, both at the local and regional levels. Buckingham was struck by the fact that a town as small as Montgomery had six churches – Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Unitarian, and Roman Catholic – and that all seemed to be well-attended. He was also very impressed by the sermon he heard in the Methodist Church. “In one of these churches, the Methodist, I heard, on the Sunday after our arrival there, one of the most chastely eloquent and beautiful addresses, that it has yet been my lot to hear in this country, delivered by a gentleman of the bar, a member of the Methodist body.” Buckingham, however, was distressed to see the “negroes and coloured people … in the gallery, “where alone they are permitted to sit in this country” and reflected on the “melancholy consideration” that they were “excluded … from all the benefits of intellectual cultivation, since, throughout the South, it is unlawful to teach a slave even to read!” While in Tuscaloosa Lyell heard Bishop Cobbs preach at Christ Church. What most impressed Lyell about the service was that, unlike English churches, there was no “clerk,” that is, a layman hired to assist the priest by reading the lessons and responding at the appropriate points in the service with the parts of the liturgy designated for lay people. “It often struck me as an advantage in the United States, that the responses are never read by an illiterate man, as happens not uncommonly in our country parishes, and the congregation joins in the service more earnestly when the part which properly belongs to them does not devolve on a regular functionary.”  In Mobile, the Pulszkys attended a public meeting to honor their fellow countryman Lajos Kossuth that took place in a large public hall known as the “Circus.” Learning that this building was sometimes used for religious services, they noted that it was one of the “peculiarities” of America that “places of worship are often thrown open for lectures and profane music, and that concert-rooms and lecture-halls are used for worship.”[xxvi]

The admission of Alabama into the Union seems to have been a catalyst for the major religious groups to create judicatories. Comprised of 125 churches and representing some 5000 Baptists, the Alabama Baptist Convention met for the first time in 1823. Although the Alabama Methodist Conference would not come into existence until 1832 (two years after the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama was formed),  Methodists were already numerous and well organized by 1830. In 1813 a Methodist camp meeting was organized at Fort Easley and by 1832, white and black Methodists together numbered about 11,000.[xxvii]  With their roots deep in Alabama’s Spanish and French past, the Roman Catholic Church (although geographically limited to the area near the Gulf coast and numerous only there) established Mobile as a separate diocese in 1829 under the leadership of Bishop Michael Portier.[xxviii] Only the Presbyterian Church was slower to organize and had more sluggish growth than the Episcopal Church.

Long before Alabama had a bishop and even before the diocese was organized, the Episcopal Church began to take root and grow.  Without any apparent coordination, Alabama’s first two Episcopal churches were organized only weeks apart in early 1828. The Rev. Robert Davis, a representative of the Episcopal Church’s Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS), presided at a meeting to launch Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, on January 7, 1828. Scarcely more than a month later on February 26, a group of Mobile’s civic leaders organized Christ Episcopal Church in that city. Davis, who presided at the meeting in Tuscaloosa, made an attempt to start an Episcopal church in Huntsville, but even though Huntsville citizens pledged nearly $3000 to build a church, Davis’ efforts there in the 1830s proved to be a false start, and the church in that city lapsed between 1836 and 1843. Parishes sprang up in the prosperous planter communities of the Black Belt and Tennessee Valley regions of Alabama, as well as sophisticated Mobile. Greensboro, only forty miles from Tuscaloosa, and on the same side of the river, was an obvious place to launch a new Episcopal church, so Albert Muller, the rector of Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, organized St. Paul’s there in 1830. Muller’s vestry, however, was reluctant to share him with Greensboro and urged him to focus only on his Tuscaloosa responsibilities.[xxix] Episcopal churches were soon organized in the nearby towns of Demopolis (Trinity, 1834), Prairie (St. John’s, 1834; now in Forkland), and Livingston (St. James, 1836). A bit farther away was Montgomery where St. John’s was organized in 1834.

In the absence of a bishop, committed lay people and a small handful of clergy nurtured Alabama’s earliest Episcopal churches. Historian William E. Dodd aptly characterized Alabama’s earliest Episcopalian lay leaders when he observed, “It is still said in the South that, although there may be other roads to the Celestial City, no gentleman would choose any but the Episcopalian way.”[xxx]  Although numerically small compared to Baptists and Methodists, Episcopalians exercised an influence on Alabama’s politics, economics, and culture out of proportion to their numbers. The founders of Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, included James M. Davenport, a physician; Tuscaloosa’s postmaster William Gould, a former member of the U.S. consular staff in France; Henry Minor, a member of the convention that drafted Alabama’s first constitution and successful candidate for the Alabama Supreme Court in 1823; Armand Pfister, a merchant and respected music teacher; and Thomas Bolling, proprietor of the Indian Queen Hotel. Another leading member of Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, was merchant Joel White, who served as a director of the state bank both in Tuscaloosa and Montgomery.[xxxi]  In her study of antebellum Mobile, Harriet Amos Doss estimates that almost 61% of Mobile’s civic leaders were Episcopalians.[xxxii] Among the founders of Christ Church, Mobile, were Samuel H. Garrow, a former president and mayor of Mobile and a member of the convention to draft Alabama’s first constitution, and Henry Hitchcock, who had been secretary of the Alabama Territory, served on the constitutional convention, and would become chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 1836.  George W. Owen, a member of the Mobile church’s vestry, served as mayor of Mobile in the 1830s, was elected speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives in 1820, and served in the U.S. Congress from 1823 to 1829.[xxxiii] Episcopalians in Montgomery and Huntsville also played important roles in early nineteenth century Alabama. Nimrod Benson, a member of St. John’s, Montgomery, was a member of the legislature in the 1820s and mayor of Montgomery in the 1830s.[xxxiv] Huntsville’s John Withers Clay, son of a governor and brother of a U.S. Senator, edited The Huntsville Democrat, and served on the Church of the Nativity’s vestry.[xxxv] Possibly the most prominent Episcopalians in the young state were Abner S. Lipscomb and John Gayle. In 1831 and 1832 Lipscomb and Gayle served as delegates to diocesan convention from Christ Church, Mobile, and St. Paul’s, Greensboro, respectively.[xxxvi] Lipscomb, who apprenticed in the law office of John C. Calhoun, was a member of the legislature, an associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, and eventually rose to become secretary of state for the Republic of Texas. Gayle was governor of Alabama from 1831 to 1835. [xxxvii]  Octavia Walton LeVert (1810-1877), an Alabama writer whohad an international reputation, was a member of Christ Church, Mobile. During her 1853-1855 European tour she was received by Queen Victoria and Napoleon III, events she chronicled in her book Souvenirs of Travel (1857). In her Mobile “salon” she entertained foreign visitors, including English noblewoman and author Lady Emmeline Wortley and Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer.

The Episcopalian who may have had the greatest impact on Alabama was William Lowndes Yancey (1814-1863), a member of the vestry at St. Luke’s, Cahaba, and a delegate to diocesan convention in 1838.[xxxviii] Elected to Congress in 1844, Yancey served only one term, and became convinced that the South would eventually secede from the Union. In 1860 Yancey was a principal architect of the “Alabama Platform” that split the Democratic Party and led the Alabama delegation when it walked out of the convention. In the same year, he called for a convention that would debate secession. Yancey’s fierce advocacy of Southern independence and his efforts to achieve it caused one historian to suggest that “without Yancey’s brilliant oratory, and indefatigable labors there would have been no secession, no Southern Confederacy.”[xxxix] That may overstate the case, but it is clear that Yancey played a key role in the events that led to secession and war.[xl]

Power, status, and wealth characterized many of Alabama’s earliest Episcopal lay leaders, but it is more difficult to generalize about its clergy. Writing in The Spirit of Missions in 1838 “a gentleman of Lafayette” stated that an “Episcopal minister” who was “permanently settled” would be able to effect “lasting good” if he possessed “learning, gravity, and piety.”[xli] Many of Alabama’s earliest Episcopal clergy were learned, grave, and pious, although beyond that it is difficult to generalize. Their educational accomplishments were widely varied; some had impressive degrees from old, well-established colleges, and many had also trained at the Episcopalian seminaries in New York or Alexandria, Virginia. Bishop Cobbs himself had neither a university nor a seminary degree, although he served for a time as chaplain to the University of Virginia and was awarded a D.D. by New York’s Hobart College. Henry C. Lay of Nativity, Huntsville, was educated at the University of Virginia and the Virginia Theological Seminary. General Theological Seminary graduates included William Stickney, Nathaniel Knapp, and possibly J. Avery Shepherd.[xlii]  They came primarily from the upper South but many also came from states farther north. A surprising number of Alabama’s earliest clergy were from New England. Norman Pinney, who succeeded Henry Shaw at Christ Church, Mobile, was from Connecticut, and both Caleb Ives, one of the most energetic and successful DFMS missionaries in Alabama, and Christ Church, Mobile’s long-time rector, Samuel S. Lewis, were natives of Vermont. Nathaniel P. Knapp, who succeeded Lewis, was a New Yorker. Henry N. Pierce, rector of St. John’s, Montgomery from 1857-68, and then bishop of Arkansas, hailed from Rhode Island. John H. Linebaugh, who helped organize churches at Eutaw, Cahaba, and Selma, was from Kentucky and came to the ministry after a career as a lawyer. He subsequently left the ministry and worked as a journalist during the Civil War. His life ended tragically when he drowned after falling from a steamboat while traveling from Montgomery to Selma.[xliii]

One of Alabama’s most important early clergymen was Henry C. Lay, rector of Huntsville’s Church of the Nativity from 1847 to 1859. Journalist and lawyer John Withers Clay had known Lay when both were students at the University of Virginia and Clay recruited his college friend for Nativity: “I shall not rest perfectly satisfied,” Clay wrote to his friend, “until we get you into this diocese. What are the prospective chances for our success?”[xliv] Lay became Cobbs’ protégé and close personal friend. Indeed, they were so close that the bishop wrote, “No father can love a Son more than I love you.”[xlv] When the General Convention appointed Lay to be missionary bishop of the southwest in 1859 we can be certain that Cobbs must have lobbied heavily for him.

Many of the Episcopal clergy who served the Diocese of Alabama in the early nineteenth century received support from the Episcopal Church’s Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS). In 1829, the DFMS heard the first reports of "missionaries, most of whom are now labouring with highly encouraging prospects, [who] have been sent ... to Tuscaloosa in Alabama..."[xlvi] Not long before Christ Church, Mobile, was organized, the Rev. Henry Shaw became the pastor of Mobile’s Protestant “union” church. The Rev. Robert Davis presided at the meeting to organize Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, but afterward he may have left the ministry. According to Jackson Kemper, missionary bishop of the northwest, who visited Tuscaloosa in 1838, Davis “preached once or twice after he came here, as an Episcopal clergyman – then studied law, but continued his habits of intoxication, & died suddenly. During Bishop Brownell’s 1830 visit to Mobile he “visited the grave of the lamented Judd, the Missionary of the Society for Tuscaloosa.”[xlvii] Judd had served as first rector of Tuscaloosa’s Christ Church. After the organization of the diocese in 1830 many more DFMS missionaries came to Alabama and helped organize Episcopal churches in Tuscaloosa, Huntsville, Jacksonville, Florence, and elsewhere.

The DFMS also helped provide provisional episcopal leadership to Alabama by at least partially underwriting the expenses of Alabama’s four provisional bishops: Thomas C. Brownell, bishop of Connecticut; James Hervey Otey, bishop of Tennessee; Jackson Kemper, missionary bishop of the Northwest (later the first bishop of Wisconsin); and Leonidas L. Polk, missionary bishop of the Southwest (later the first bishop of Louisiana). Brownell, Otey, Kemper, and Polk were men of heroic faith. They traveled thousands of miles to ordain, confirm, preside at diocesan meetings, mediate disputes between vestries and clergy, or simply to encourage isolated congregations and priests. Bishop Polk’s experience illustrates the point. In 1839 his report to the DFMS noted that he had traveled about 5,000 miles in five months. During that time he “preached forty-four sermons, performed fourteen baptisms, forty-one confirmations, laid the corner stone of one church, and consecrated another.”[xlviii]

No sooner had the Diocese of Alabama been organized, however, than it sought to merge with the dioceses of Mississippi and Louisiana to form a "Southwestern Diocese."  The General Convention authorized this experiment to proceed,[xlix] but the Southwestern Diocese proved impractical, and in 1835 the canon providing for a Southwestern Diocese was repealed.  The Diocese of Alabama was reconstituted at the 1836 convention in Mobile. The reason given for the short-lived experiment of merging Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana into a single diocese was to facilitate the election of a bishop for these three dioceses. There was only one attempt to elect a bishop for this vast and unwieldy diocese, and it was unsuccessful. At its first (and last) convention (held in New Orleans on March 4 and 5, 1835) the Diocese of the Southwest elected the Rev. Francis L. Hawks, rector of St. Thomas’ Church, New York, to be its bishop. However, Hawks declined the honor of becoming bishop of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.[l] 

Although the Episcopal Church grew in early nineteenth century Alabama, it did not grow nearly as rapidly as the Methodist and Baptist churches. Many of Alabama’s most prominent citizens were Episcopalians, but the great majority of Alabamians who lacked power, status, and affluence did not join the Episcopal Church in large numbers. One barrier that kept out persons of modest means was the practice of selling and renting pews.  Until the late nineteenth century underwriting the parish budget by the sale or rental of pews was common in the Episcopal Church (as well as other churches); nevertheless it served to push to one side (literally) the poor and even persons of modest means. Christ Church, Mobile, authorized a committee to determine how much rent to charge for its pews and to rent them “to such persons as they may deem most for the interest of the church.” They acknowledged, however, that some room should be made available for persons without the means to pay pew rent and instructed the committee to set aside “sufficient room for the use of strangers, and poor persons…and also to have benches for the colored persons…” Christ Church’s system had at least three tiers: those well-to-do enough to rent pews, “strangers” and the poor, and “colored persons.” In fact, the system was even more stratified. Pew rent varied depending on the location of the pew. The affluence and status of a family worshiping at Christ Church would be obvious just by observing where they sat. In 1837 Christ Church rented 84 pews for a total of $7,995.[li] Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, sold its pews at public auction for $100 per pew[lii] (On average, that was about the same rate Christ Church, Mobile, received in rent per pew.) An exception to the pew rent system was Trinity Church, Mobile. The previously mentioned “Ladies’ Missionary Sewing Society of Christ Church” were as good as their word. They underwrote the salary of the Rev. B.M. Miller of Norfolk, Virginia, and in 1845 he organized the congregation that became Trinity Church, Mobile’s second Episcopal church. It was specifically founded “upon the free pew system, thus affording an open way to the Altars of our beloved Zion…” However, in 1867 financial pressures forced Trinity to rent most of its pews. [liii] Mobile’s third Episcopal church, St. John’s, also began as a “free church” (i.e., its pews were free) and remained so.

In 1843, the Committee on the State of the Church identified another obstacle to church growth: “…the want of an Episcopal head.”[liv]  The span of fourteen years between the organization of the diocese and the election of the first bishop seems long but was not unusual. The dioceses of Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi took anywhere from five to twenty-three years to elect bishops. Part of the problem was finding priests willing to serve as frontier bishops. The first attempt to elect a bishop for Alabama was in 1835 (during the brief time Alabama was part of the Diocese of the Southwest), but the candidate elected (Francis L. Hawkes of St. Thomas, New York) refused to serve. The next attempt came in 1842, and again the man chosen was unwilling to accept the position. So, Alabama was prepared (with the help of Mississippi and Louisiana) to elect a bishop in 1835, and there was a hiatus of only seven years before it felt ready to hold its next episcopal election. Still, seven years seems like a long time. The reason usually given for Alabama’s failure to elect a bishop earlier is that the diocese did not have enough money, but this is not convincing. As noted earlier, Christ Church, Mobile, had sufficient financial resources to pay their minister $2000 per year in 1828 and to authorize the construction of a church at a cost of at least $12,000. By March of 1830, Episcopalians in Tuscaloosa had constructed a church, and their minister was helping to organize congregations in Greensboro and Demopolis.[lv] And at the first meeting of the Diocese of Alabama following the unfortunate Diocese of the Southwest experiment, there were at least three Episcopal church buildings in the state. The lay leaders of the Episcopal Church in Alabama included some of the state’s wealthiest and most influential citizens. Alabama’s Episcopalians lacked the will to elect a bishop, not the funding. One strategy for funding a bishop’s salary that had been used successfully elsewhere in the PECUSA was for a bishop to function both as rector of a parish and as diocesan bishop. America’s first bishop, Samuel Seabury, was both Bishop of Connecticut and rector of St. James’ Church, New Haven, from 1785 to 1796. New York’s first bishop, Samuel Provoost, was simultaneously Bishop of New York and rector of Trinity Church in lower Manhattan from 1787 to 1800. And the man more responsible than any other for the organization of the PECUSA, William White, was Bishop of Pennsylvania, as well as rector of Philadelphia’s Christ Church from 1787 until his death in 1836. A similar arrangement was first rejected then later accepted by Alabama’s first bishop, Nicholas Hamner Cobbs, who served as rector of Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, and later as rector of St. John’s, Montgomery.  One suspects that at least part of the reason for the delay in electing a bishop (in Alabama and elsewhere) was that (in spite of the Committee on the State of the Church’s plea for “an Episcopal head”) bishops were seen (either consciously or unconsciously) as somewhat peripheral. The Church of England’s failure to install a resident bishop in North America and the deliberate decision by the organizers of the Episcopal Church to weaken the office of bishop created an ethos in the Episcopal Church that can best be described as “episcopal polity but congregational praxis.”

The Diocese of Alabama first tried to elect its own bishop in 1842 when delegates to the 1842 convention chose the Rev. Martin Parks. Park, the chaplain at West Point, who declined the honor. The following year they elected the Rev. James T Johnston, who also declined.  Finally, delegates to the 1844 diocesan convention at St. Paul’s, Greensboro, elected the Diocese of Alabama’s first bishop:  Nicholas Hamner Cobbs, the rector of St. Paul’s Church in Cincinnati.[lvi] [lvii]  Cobbs had no apparent connection to Alabama, but his Virginia roots may help explain how he came to be elected Alabama’s first bishop. The Diocese of Virginia was a veritable nursery of bishops. Parks and Johnston, the priests who had declined election, were also Virginians. Furthermore, two of Alabama’s provisional bishops, Polk and Otey, had strong Virginia connections. Polk had been the assistant rector at Richmond’s Monumental Church, and Otey had grown up near Cobbs in Virginia.[lviii] It is also possible that John Withers Clay, a member of the vestry at Nativity, Huntsville, had known Cobbs while he was a student at the University of Virginia. One additional reason for Cobbs’ election may be that his moderately high church theological position was a good fit for the theological climate that had already been established in the Diocese of Alabama.

Regardless of the reason for electing Cobbs, Alabama’s Episcopalians chose well. Cobbs proved to be deeply pious, conscientious, and industrious to a fault.  Born February 5, 1795, near Lynchburg, Cobbs’ father was a Presbyterian and his mother was an Episcopalian.[lix] Greenough White, Cobbs’ biographer, reports that his mother was so determined that her son would be baptized by a priest of the church that she traveled sixty miles on horseback to the nearest clergyman. This has the ring of hagiography rather than biography, because such a journey would have taken four or five days! However, it does point to the deep imprint that his mother’s loyalty to the Episcopal Church must have had on Cobbs.[lx]  White tells us that Cobbs read Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity and taught himself to read Hebrew. Although he attended an Episcopal service only once, his mother drilled him in the catechism. Even though his experience of the Episcopal Church was slight, he felt called to its ordained ministry and applied for Holy Orders. At the 1824 convention of the Diocese of Virginia Cobbs was confirmed, received communion for the first time, and was ordained deacon.[lxi]

Cobbs was a school teacher at the time of his ordination to the diaconate and continued to derive most of his income from teaching for several years thereafter. However, after ordination he took charge of two churches in Russell parish – St. Stephen’s and Trinity – and helped restore them to vitality. Apparently, Cobbs quickly distinguished himself; in 1829 he became a trustee of General Theological Seminary and he preached the convention sermon at the 1830 convention of the Diocese of Virginia. As mentioned previously, Cobbs served for one year as chaplain of the University of Virginia and afterward returned to Russell parish. In 1839 Cobbs was called to serve the Episcopal Church in Bristol parish (Petersburg).[lxii]  By the time he went to Petersburg, Cobbs had begun to make a name for himself. In 1841 he was discussed as a possible missionary bishop of Texas, and he was also in the running to become the suffragan or assistant bishop of Virginia. In 1843 New York’s Hobart College conferred the degree of Doctor of Divinity on Cobbs, and in the same year he was called to St. Paul’s Church in Cincinnati. Then, less than a year after moving to Cincinnati, the Diocese of Alabama elected Nicholas Hamner Cobbs to serve as their first bishop.[lxiii]

Care of African Americans, both slave and free, was a major theme of Cobbs’ episcopate. When Cobbs delivered his first annual report to the diocese, he noted that during a pastoral visit to Mobile he had “preached to a small congregation of Colored people.”[lxiv]  Cobbs also committed himself and the diocese to reaching out to Alabama’s African Americans. Slaves were a part of the Episcopal Church in Alabama from the very beginning, although this prompts the question: Was their presence coerced or voluntary? Undoubtedly, in most cases it was coerced but the opportunity to hear the stories of scripture, sing psalms and hymns, and receive the sacraments of the church may also have given a measure of comfort and hope to enslaved African Americans. Historian Blake Touchstone observes, “Slaves accepted Christianity and made it an essential part of their culture. It gave meaning and purpose to those in bondage, buttressing both individual and communal identities.”[lxv]

Alabama’s Episcopal clergy routinely baptized slaves and sometimes officiated at slave weddings (although these had no standing in law).  They were also constantly urged to provide religious instruction for slaves. In 1842 the Committee on the State of the Church stated that they

were gratified to observe…that the colored population have received some attention from our clergy, and they would earnestly recommend to this Convention the importance of devising some efficient means for their religious instruction. In the mean time they hope that the clergy will continue their individual exertions for this purpose, and avail themselves of such opportunities as may offer to preach the gospel to them.[lxvi]

 

Committed though he was to the spiritual care of African Americans, Cobbs seems to have had no moral qualms about slavery. He grew up in a culture that took slavery for granted. His biographer notes that when Cobbs was called to St. Paul’s in Cincinnati, Ohio, a free state, he freed his slaves, rather than selling them.  His former slaves, however, followed Cobbs to Ohio.  More than likely, their decision to accompany their former master to Ohio was that a free state offered more opportunities, freedoms, and legal protection for emancipated slaves. The slave censuses for 1850 and 1860, however, show that when Cobbs moved to Alabama he once again acquired slaves.  But there is no doubt that Alabama’s first bishop was sincerely committed to the spiritual welfare of African Americans, both free and slave. In his very first address to the diocesan convention Cobbs stated his hope “that ‘ere long, we shall see multitudes of the African race coming to the Ordinances of the Church.” [lxvii] He was convinced that slaves would respond positively to the repetitive nature of the Anglican liturgy and to its “call and response” format. Cobbs believed that

the services of the Church are eminently suited ot the wants and circumstances of the colored people. They embody the elementary instruction specially needed by that class of people, and they seem by constant repetition to fasten truth upon the memory and conscience: and besides the benefit of its devotional teaching, the Liturgy furnishes in its chants and responses something that is peculiarly in harmony with the genius, and taste and habits of the African race.[lxviii]

 

The bishop’s annual reports make frequent mention of services he conducted with “colored people.”  Cobbs began his episcopate by stating that it was his “purpose to pay special attention to the Slave population in the Diocese…” also seems to point in an enlightened direction.[lxix] He constantly urged his clergy to see to the spiritual needs of blacks, and routinely praised both priests and lay people who ministered to blacks. However, in “Naaman and the Hebrew Maid” (one of his few published sermons), Cobbs’ attitude seems to be aptly characterized as noblesse oblige. Cobbs wrote that “the peace, comfort and happiness of a whole family depend on the tempers and deportment of domestics and dependents.” Thus, he reasoned, “let us be careful to value the respect, the prayer and benedictions of the poor and the dependents.”[lxx]

Bishop Cobbs spoke approvingly of slaveowners (usually women) who drilled their slaves in the catechism. In his address to diocesan convention in 1846, the bishop reported that he had visited the Faunsdale Plantation and observed Louisa Harrison “giving regular instruction to her servants by reading the services of the Church, and by steadily catechising  the children. … It was impossible to hear their prompt answers, and to listen to their excellent singing and chanting, without the liveliest sensibility.”[lxxi] In 1847 the minister at Union Parish, Uniontown, similarly recorded that the

ladies of the congregation …are still zealously engaged in Catechising the colored children. On each Sabbath, it is the custom of such ladies as are engaged in this good work, to assemble around them all children on the plantations, who are old enough to receive instruction. Bishop Ives’ Catechism is chiefly used, and when the classes are sufficiently advanced, they are then taught the Catechism of the Church. To prevent tediousness, singing is intermingled with the instruction – it never fails to produce the desired effect. From time to time, I attend the recitations, and often has my heart been cheered by hearing the Hymns and Chants of the Church by the different classes.[lxxii]

 

These references to clergy and slaveowners instructing or catechizing slaves could be multiplied many times. The constant emphasis on instructing and catechizing slaves strongly suggests the idea that religious instruction was an instrument of social control. However, as previously noted, slaves also received the sacraments and rites of the church, such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals. It is also possible that slaveowners enlisted even the sacraments to inculcate docility and subservience in their slaves. Historian Henry Walker suggests that as war drew close, slaveowners had their slaves baptized, hoping that this would render them more docile in the event of civil war followed by a northern victory and emancipation. Walker’s thesis is supported by the experience of Francis Hanson. Hanson’s account of his duties during the 1850s records several occasions when slaveowners had him baptize large numbers of their slaves. On a single Sunday in August, 1854, Francis Hanson visited three plantations and baptized a total of 106 “negro children.”[lxxiii] Furthermore, during the time he was bishop of Alabama, Nicholas Hamner Cobbs baptized 1500 slaves.  Somewhat ironically, Cobbs helped institutionalize the Diocese of Alabama’s “separate but equal” treatment of African Americans by requiring parochial reports to record white and “colored” baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and burials in separate columns.

The most significant outreach to blacks occurred at the Faunsdale Plantation in Marengo County. Louisa Harrison, widow of planter Thomas Harrison, catechized her slaves weekly on Sunday afternoons. Bishop Cobbs often praised her efforts at religious education among her “servants:”

In this interesting Parish there is manifested on the part of the Ladies an increasing interest in the catechitical [sic] instruction of their servants. It is truly delightful to the heart of a Christian to be present at the examination of one of these classes of colored children, to hear their prompt answers and their delightful singing…[lxxiv]

William Stickney (one of the first men Bishop Cobbs ordained) spent almost his entire career as a priest at St. Michael’s, the chapel for the Faunsdale Plantation, and in 1863 Bishop Wilmer designated Stickney “Missionary to the Negroes.” In 1864, Stickney married Louisa Harrison, who became not only his wife but his fellow minister among the African Americans of the Black Belt.

Alongside slaves (but in far smaller numbers) Alabama’s earliest Episcopalians also included “free persons of color.” A notable parishioner of Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, was Solomon Perteet, a free black man who had accumulated remarkable wealth.[lxxv] Most black Episcopalians were slaves. Perteet was an exception but by no means the only free black Episcopalian in Alabama. In 1854, Bishop Cobbs confirmed seven free black men and women at Trinity Church, Mobile. These seven became the nucleus of Good Shepherd, Mobile, Alabama’s first black Episcopal Church.[lxxvi] In his first address to diocesan convention, Cobbs mentioned that during a visitation to Mobile he had “preached to a small congregation of Colored people.” One wonders if some of these might have been among the seven he confirmed nine years later, but there is no way to know. Founding Good Shepherd was a courageous and perhaps even a subversive act. Leah Rawls Atkins writes “free blacks …were looked upon with distrust by whites, who considered them a dangerous example in a slave society.” Indeed, it was illegal for free blacks to form a church. Only in Mobile, with its large population of free blacks could a black Episcopal Church have been established in the 1850s.[lxxvii]

Although barred from ordained ministry and elected office, women played many roles in the early history of the Diocese of Alabama. The women of Alabama’s first Episcopal churches sometimes raised substantial amounts of money for vital parish needs. The women of Christ Church, Mobile, the most affluent parish in the diocese, provided the following items for the church: pew cushions, a mahogany “Communion-table,” two chairs for the chancel, a surplice for the Rector, and cushions for pulpit and reading-desk. It would be difficult to determine how much these items cost but they must have been substantial.[lxxviii]: In his parochial report for 1847, the Rev. John Linebaugh implies that St. Paul’s, Selma, would not have survived without a contribution of $125.00 by the “Ladies sewing society.”[lxxix] The records suggest that Episcopal laywomen did not focus exclusively on building and beautifying their own parishes but were as concerned (if not more concerned) about outreach beyond the parish. For example, in 1857 George Stickney, the rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Mobile, noted that two women’s organizations, the Christ Church Sewing Society and the “Little Girls’ Sewing Society” had raised a total of $726.75 for his parish and that a further $270 had been raised by “a Committee of Ladies.”[lxxx] In the very first parochial report for Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, its rector records that the women of the parish had organized a “society for the promotion of Christian knowledge and piety.”[lxxxi] Another women’s group gave material and financial help to missionaries in Greece[lxxxii] In 1845 the women of Christ Church, Mobile, undertook their most ambitious outreach project. They raised the money to underwrite a “City Missionary, who should preach the gospel… to all who might feel disposed to attend upon his services, as well as to pay particular attention to the spiritual wants of the colored population, and to visit the poor, sick, and distressed, without regard to denominational distinctions, so far as enabled to do so.”[lxxxiii]

            In addition to fundraisers for outreach, the women of the Diocese of Alabama also produced one of the most important foreign missionaries that the DFMS sent abroad in the nineteenth century. Emma Jones of Christ Church, Mobile, accompanied William Jones Boone, missionary bishop of China, to Shanghai in 1844. In 1854 she founded St. Mary’s School for Girls, which was one of Shanghai’s leading girls’ schools for a century until it was closed in 1951. Jones wrote that her motivation in founding St. Mary’s School was “to collect the female children of China, and instruct them in that blessed Gospel which has elevated their sex wherever it has been promulged [sic]…”[lxxxiv]  Apart from one trip back to the U.S., Jones served in China until her death in 1879.

 When Nicholas Hamner Cobbs became bishop of Alabama the business of building a diocese on the Alabama frontier must have seemed daunting. When he was consecrated the Episcopal Church in Alabama consisted of about 450 communicants, eighteen parishes and missions, and about fifteen clergy. We know few details about the daily routines of Alabama’s first bishop and his clergy, but Henry C. Lay’s letters give us some ideas of how hard they worked. “This North Alabama work is an Egyptian sort of business,” wrote Lay to a friend in 1854, “ make brick- make brick- why don’t you make brick? While the straw is very scarce.” Lay, like Cobbs, was prone to overwork, and the bishop had to caution Lay against doing too much. Not long after Lay came to Huntsville, Cobbs wrote and admonished him against preaching three times a Sunday during Lent. “Twice a day is enough for any man, however robust he may be. Even that number with our service is equal to four sermons a day. Your life is too valuable to be wantonly thrown away.”[lxxxv] The relatively short distances between the small Black Belt towns allowed Francis Hanson to serve two or three churches at a time. He regularly conducted two services every Sunday:

On Easter Sunday [sic] I preached and administered the Holy communion [sic] in St. Andrews church in the morning…In the afternoon I preached, and administered the Holy Communion in Trinity Church, Demopolis. The same sermon in both places….Sunday May the first, preached in the morning in St. Andrews and in the afternoon in Trinity church, Demopolis.[lxxxvi]

 

Bishop Cobbs set an ambitious example of hard work for his clergy, as we can see in Henry C. Lay’s account of Cobbs’ pastoral visitation to points in the Tennessee Valley:

At Florence 2 persons were confirmed, but the good time was in Tuscumbia, where Mr. Cobbs members numbering 17, were increased by the addition of fifteen confirmed: We were at work in good earnest for four or five days, preaching in the most pointed way we could, visiting and talking all day long, and rejoicing with exceeding joy as one poor sinner after another agreed to give up, and dedicate himself to the Lord…. In the band were the old & the young, men & women, a Presbyterian, a Campbellite, and two Roman Catholics.[lxxxvii]

 

The task of going from church to church was made even more onerous by the state of transportation in early nineteenth century Alabama. When Cobbs became bishop in 1844 the principal means of transportation was via river and the only rail line ran from Montgomery to the Georgia border.  In spite of the primitive state of transportation, Bishop Cobbs resolved to visit every Episcopalian household in Alabama.[lxxxviii]  J.H. Ticknor, a DFMS missionary at Livingston, wrote in 1855 that his closest parishioners were ten miles away and that it took him “four hours and a half driving 2 horses in a light buggy [to go] ten miles” on a good day, but that “a few days later the buggy could not have been pulled through the road.” Under the circumstances, Ticknor wrote, it was an accomplishment just “to keep the church alive.”[lxxxix] On his way to church on Sunday morning, W.A. Harris, missionary at Florence, faced an obstacle he could not surmount when “[t]he ferryman refused to take me across the Tennessee… on account of the quantity of ice in the river…”[xc] When traveling longer distances the clergy had to rely on the notoriously dangerous steamboats that plied the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers. According to Scottish traveler Alexander Mackay, steamboats had an “ominous name to European ears” because they “so often prove fatal to their passengers.”[xci] One of Alabama’s priests complained to Sir Charles Lyell that when the clergy had to “travel through these woods in summer” they had to “endure the bites of countless musquitos [sic], fleas, and bugs.”[xcii]

Sickness and death were daily realities in the nineteenth century, and this was especially true of wild and unsettled places such as the Alabama frontier. Sometimes the missionaries feared for their lives. In 1836, Thomas A. Cook, a DFMS missionary at Florence, Alabama, wrote of “a rupture” that was “about to commence with the Creek Indians, who lie across my path,” but was confident that God would protect him “from all danger.”[xciii] Cook was wise to fear trouble from the Creeks. The attempt to remove the Creeks from eastern Alabama precipitated a brief war that forced Governor Clay to call out the militia.[xciv] At other times, the missionaries or their families fell prey to sicknesses common on the frontier. Writing from Selma in 1846, John H. Linebaugh, informed the DFMS that though he was “sick in bed most of the time, and all the time feeble” he managed to preach eleven times. However, the greater sacrifice was borne by his family. Linebaugh wrote that his youngest child died “from congestion of the Brain on the 13th of August.  He was a son and in 12th month of his age.  He died in the county of Tuscaloosa, at the residence of my wifes Mother, and was buried by the Bishop.”[xcv] Bishop Cobbs lost a daughter in 1852 whom he described as the “light & the pride & the joy of a Father’s heart…” [xcvi]

Money was also a concern for some of the clergy.  In a letter to the convention of the Diocese of Alabama in 1837, the Rev. Caleb S. Ives defended his decision to leave parochial ministry to teach school.  Ives took up teaching "to liquidate a debt, which I, under indigent circumstances incurred in educating myself for the ministry of the church..."[xcvii]  Bishop Cobbs had to remind the diocese in his annual addresses both in 1849 and 1858 that one of the difficulties “in the way of building up the Church” was “the inadequate support of the Clergy.” Not only was the compensation meager, but clergy were not always “punctually and fully paid.”[xcviii]

Not only were they underpaid (and sometimes not paid at all!), there was also little job security for Alabama’s earliest Episcopal clergy. There was little job security for clergy, especially in the years between 1830 and 1844 when Alabama’s provisional bishops were seldom available to mediate conflicts between parish clergy and their vestries. Clergy in Alabama’s earliest Episcopal churches had one-year contracts that were voted on by the vestry at the annual meeting which in most parishes took place on Easter Monday (which was also the day on which vestry members stood for election). The tenuousness of clergy employment is demonstrated by the history of Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, which had eleven rectors in its first thirteen years.[xcix] Christ Church, Mobile, was considerably more stable, with only four rectors between 1830 and 1854 (and one of those died after less than a year as rector).

We have also to lament the frequent removal of ministers from one parish to another one of the Diocese. The Committee know not that the expression of their opinion will be of any avail to counteract any tendency to farther change, but cannot refrain from recording their deliberate conviction that few things are more deleterious to the best interests of the Church than the frequent separation of minister and people.[c]

 

Samuel Lewis and Nathaniel Knapp illustrate the problem. Both had been rectors of Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, before going to Christ Church, Mobile. Knapp began at St. Peter’s, Lowndes County, in 1838; moved to Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, and then to St. John’s, Montgomery, in 1843. Then in 1848 he went to Christ Church, Mobile, first as Samuel Lewis’ assistant and later as the rector.

Episcopal clergy in Alabama encountered both warm hospitality and deep suspicion from members of other churches.  Other denominations freely extended their hospitality to Episcopalians and their clergy. In his 1830 visit to Selma, Connecticut bishop Thomas C. Brownell wrote that “[t]he Clergyman of the Presbyterian Church immediately called on us, and invited us to officiate in the House of worship there.” Similarly, in Montgomery he preached in the Methodist church, although he noted “a large portion of the population of the village found a stronger attraction at the Theatre.”[ci] In Florence Thomas Cook noted he had met “with greater kindness from other denominations than …ever …before” and that there was a high degree of friendship and cooperation between the Episcopal Church and other denominations. However, he also alluded to widespread misunderstanding of the Episcopal Church. Other denominations, he said, had started “to look upon our Church as Orthodox and Christian” and that they had begun to believe that “our doctrines are so much like the Bible.”[cii] Cook’s successor in Florence, W.A. Harris, wrote that he had “preached in the Campbellite and Methodist meeting houses, to very good and attentive congregations.”[ciii] On three occasions, the diocesan convention met in churches of other denominations. In Mobile in 1836, Greensboro in 1837, and Selma in 1839, the diocesan convention met in Presbyterian churches because either the local Episcopal church was unusable or had not yet been constructed.

            The ecumenical hospitality extended to the Episcopal Church and its clergy is remarkable, especially in light of the fact that the he Episcopal Church did not embrace the prevailing revivalist ethos and seemed to resemble the Roman Catholic Church a little too closely. Most American denominations embraced revivalism in the early nineteenth century. These revivals were echoes of the Second Great Awakening, an outbreak of religious fervor that began simultaneously at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, and in New Haven and other Connecticut towns in the 1790s. The revivals spread south and west during the early nineteenth century, the same years in which Alabama's Episcopal diocese was beginning to grow.[civ]  David Brown, DFMS missionary at Florence and Tuscumbia from 1841 to 1846, described his station as “stony ground at best” because it had

been frequently swept over by storm[s] of fanaticism, raised and impelled by the united powers of all the sects…The people generally here seem to have no notion of religion but as occasionally or periodically producing a mass-meeting, and bringing together some "celebrated orators" to tickle their ears and excite their passions.  And when excited they are said to "get religion", and are fully licensed to say to all others, we are holier than you and so they pass through the arena of scoffing fanaticism into the cavernous vortex of scoffing infidelity; and by the sop of their native piety and fear of God, their last state is very far worse then the first.

 

Brown concluded that “the sober and solemn services of the church are ill-adapted to the taste of this country.”[cv]  Just a few years later (1854) Richard Cobbs (son of Alabama’s first bishop) wrote that “[t]his whole region of country has been peculiarly under the influences of the "Revival System," and nowhere are its deadening effects more clearly manifested.  The natural consequence has been, that the minds of the people are not at all disposed to like the sober and solemn forms of the Church which are so little calculated to minister to mere physical excitement.”[cvi] The Rev. William A. Stickney, writing from Marion in 1848, noted that "...three years ago the whole land was aroused by these excitement meetings which now it is very difficult for them to get up any kind of an excitement, though they waste steam enough to have carried a ten times greater power a few years ago."[cvii]

The similarities between the liturgy and polity of the Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic Church also produced suspicion and misunderstanding. Bishop Cobbs identified fear that the Episcopal Church was “Romish” as an obstacle to growth, but he seems to have had a good relationship with the clergy and lay people of other denominations. Accused of seeking to recruit members of other denominations for the Episcopal Church (an accusation he denied), Cobbs replied, “Why should people complain of me because I love them so well that I want them to live with me? The greatest harm I wish to Presbyterians and Methodists is to see them good members of the church.”[cviii] The clergy of other denominations appear to have thought well of Cobbs. If his biographer is to be believed, Presbyterian and Methodists ministers and a Roman Catholic priest were with him when he died.[cix]

            There was some justification for the suspicion that the Episcopal Church was (for some, at least) a halfway house between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.  North Carolina’s bishop, Levi Silliman Ives, converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1852. Prior to Ives’ conversion to Roman Catholicism, John Henry Hobart’s theology had come to dominate the PECUSA.  Hobart’s theology was “high church” but prior to the Oxford Movement, high churchmanship was more a matter of theology than ritual. The Hobartians believed in baptismal regeneration, sacramental grace, and believed that episcopacy was a divinely instituted polity. The theological climate of the Episcopal Church in Alabama was relatively high church in the Hobartian sense. Three of its provisional bishops were firmly in the Hobartian camp – Brownell, Otey, and Kemper – and several of its clergy (Stickney and Knapp, in particular) were graduates of New York’s General Theological Seminary that had been founded by Hobart.

Publicly, Cobbs’ theological position was that of a moderate high churchman. He articulated his theology most clearly in his 1849 address to the diocesan convention. In it he condemned the positions taken by both catholic and protestant extremists, but he addressed the extreme catholic position first.  Cobbs took on catholic extremism first because this was more pressing. John Keble’s 1833 Assize Sermon, “National Apostasy,” is usually regarded as the beginning of the Oxford Movement. The “Tracts of the Times” were published between 1833 and 1841. When Cobbs forcefully condemned those who, “under the pretence of Antiquity and Catholicity” had introduced “various puerilities, in matters connected with the worship and chancel arrangements of the Church,” he was referring to American adherents of the Oxford Movement. They were, he said,

a new set of reformers, who, whilst very harsh in denouncing different Protestant bodies as heretics, and schismatics, are yet very tender and apologetic in their remarks in reference to various errors of Romanism, especially the doctrines of Purgatory, Transubstantiation, Auricular Confession, and the Invocation of the Virgin Mary; men who whilst talking about their devotion to the Church, treat with disregard her divinely appointed officers, and who, whilst preaching up obedience, show in their conduct all the willfulness and pride of self, manifested by the most obstinate and wrong headed sectary. … though they may flatter themselves that they are Catholics, they can not justly be called sound churchmen.[cx]

 

Cobbs identified this position as a reason for the “hindrance to the growth of the Church” in Alabama.[cxi] At the same time, Cobbs challenged the extreme evangelical or protestant position, which he characterized as having a “low and defective view …of the Church, the ministry, and the sacraments.”

The consequence of this is that many of her baptized members grow up ignorant of her doctrines, careless of her sanctions, indifferent to her privileges, neglectful of her ordinations; and finally, turning their backs upon their spiritual mother, go off into schism, or heresy, or worldliness.[cxii]

 

Cobbs may have had in mind his experience at the University of Virginia. Jefferson’s Deist convictions had led him to found a university in which religion would play no official role, and the result, according to Cobb’s biographer was “a community where religion and its ministers had been regarded with aversion and contempt.”[cxiii]

In a personal letter to Tennessee’s bishop, James H. Otey, Cobbs expressed an extremely high view of the episcopacy. “The right of governing the church was committed by a divine grant to the Apostles & their Successors,” Cobbs wrote. “The truth is – my Dear Bishop – we have carried the lay element… too far in this country from a morbid jealousy of Bishops.”[cxiv]  Cobbs’ was convinced that the church is “a Divine institution, to which it is a Christian duty and a great blessing to belong and from which it is a serious loss, and a fearful sin wantonly to separate.” And by “the Church” Cobbs specifically meant those institutions that had maintained the apostolic succession. He was convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was in error, but he was equally convinced that the other Protestant churches were not “the Church” in the fullest sense. To him it was not “a matter of indifference whether people belong to the One True Catholic and Apostolic Church, or to any Christian organization of human origin.” As Bishop Hobart in New York had opposed cooperation with the Bible Society, so Cobbs frowned on “merging of her means and her influence with other associations.”[cxv]  Even though Cobbs’ theology put him firmly in the high church camp, he maintained close ties with evangelicals. Virginia’s evangelical Bishop Meade invited Cobbs to preach at the ordination of the Virginia Theological Seminary’s class of 1848.

            Often other denominations opened their doors to the Episcopal Church when its members had not yet built their own church. In 1838 Andrew Matthews reported that his Marion congregation held its services in the court house[cxvi] In 1847 the Vestry of Christ Church, Mobile, proposed holding a concert in the church to raise money, but its rector, the Reverend Nathaniel Knapp, protested.  However, it is not clear whether Knapp was protesting the use of the church to raise money or for a non-liturgical function or both.[cxvii] Prior to building its own building St. John’s, Montgomery, met in the local Baptist church most of the time but sometimes met in either the Universalist or Presbyterian churches. Francis Hanson notes several times in his diary that he preached in churches of other denominations, and in one places notes that the bishop not only preached in a Presbyterian church but also administered the rite of confirmation there.[cxviii]

Where congregations had sufficient resources, Alabama’s Episcopalians tended to favor Gothic structures and many built architecturally distinguished buildings. Tuscaloosa’s Episcopalians employed the architect, Captain William Nichols who also designed the state capitol (when it was in Tuscaloosa) and the first buildings of the University of Alabama.[cxix] Mobile’s Trinity Church was designed by Frank Wills and Henry Dudley, enthusiastic disciples of the leading English architect, Augustus Pugin.[cxx] Founder of the New York Ecclesiological Society, Wills did much to propagate Neo-Gothic architecture in America.  Wills and Dudley’s work in Mobile created something of a vogue for Neo-Gothic