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Alexander Crummell and the Anti-Slavery Dilemma of the Episcopal Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2019

THOMAS STRANGE
THOMAS STRANGE*
Affiliation:
Felsted School, Felsted, Essex CM6 3LL; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Alexander Crummell's application to enter the General Theological Seminary in 1839 was problematic for the Episcopal Church. Admitting the African American abolitionist would have exacerbated divisions over slavery within a denomination still recovering from the American Revolution and the Second Great Awakening. The Church's increasing financial dependence on its upper-class members was a further complication. In Northern states the social elite supported anti-abolitionist violence, whilst in the South support for the Church came predominantly from slaveholders, who opposed any form of abolitionism. In order to safeguard the Episcopal Church's future, the denomination had to reject Crummell's application.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 70 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 767 - 784
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the two anonymous readers for this Journal for their very helpful suggestions for improvement, and also Patrick Doyle and John Oldfield for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

1 Colored American, 27 Dec. 1839; Crummell, A., Jubilate: the shades and the lights of a fifty years’ ministry, Washington, DC 1894, 7–8Google Scholar.

2 Moses, W., ‘Alexander Crummell’, in Gates, H. L. Jr and Higginbotham, E. B. (eds), African American lives, Oxford– New York 2004, 198Google Scholar. Following Crummell's rejection, the anti-slavery advocate and Episcopalian Jay, John castigated the denomination, claiming ‘the true cause which led the Trustees to nullify the constitution and deny the rights of the candidate … was, that he was a coloured man’: Caste and slavery in the American Church: by a churchman, New York–London 1843, 8Google Scholar. Crummell also published the correspondence between himself and Onderdonk, commenting that ‘I have been recognized, not as a man, but as a colored man, not as a candidate, but as a colored candidate’: Colored American, 27 Dec. 1839. Early biographers of Crummell argued that his rejection was for racial reasons. Thomas Clark, bishop of Rhode Island, wrote that the application was refused ‘solely on account of the extraordinary prejudice which prevailed against the race to which he belonged’: Crummell, A., The greatness of Christ and other sermons, New York 1882, p. viiGoogle Scholar. DuBois, W. E. B. argued that the bishops who decided to reject Crummell ‘were not wicked men … they said slowly “It is all very natural – it is even commendable; but the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church cannot admit a Negro”’: The souls of black folk, Chicago 1903, 135Google Scholar. Historians have also argued that Crummell's rejection was due to race. Hein, David and Shattuck, Gardiner Jr argue that Crummell was rejected ‘on the grounds that it was not suitable to have an African American enrolled at the seminary’ and that he was ‘humiliated by Onderdonk's undisguised racism’: The Episcopalians, Westport–London 2004, 75Google Scholar.

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17 W. L. Garrison, ‘Thomas Paine’, The Liberator, 21 Nov. 1845. Molly Oshatz highlights that making the biblical case against slavery required a huge departure from the entire Protestant understanding of revelation: Slavery and sin: the fight against slavery and the rise of liberal Protestantism, Oxford 2012, 10, 44Google Scholar.

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20 Oshatz, Slavery, 51.

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23 Prichard, History of the Episcopal Church, 181. In defending the importance of apostolic succession Bishop Hobart cited William Law's first letter to the bishop of Bangor: Law set out that ‘There is an absolute necessity of a strict succession of authorized ordainers from the apostolical times, in order to constitute a Christian priest’: Hobart, J. H., An apology for apostolic order and its advocates: in a series of letters, addressed to the Rev. John M. Mason, D.D., New York 1844, 115Google Scholar. In examining the relationship between the Churches and slavery, James Birney noted that ‘smallness of … numbers’ of the Church, Episcopal, ‘and the authority of the Bishops, has prevented it from being much agitated with the anti-slavery question’: The American Churches, the bulwarks of American slavery, Newburyport 1842, 39Google Scholar. In comparison, Oshatz notes that Evangelical denominations ‘had no power to force compromise’ and ‘lacked the authority or even the mandate to maintain unity’: Slavery, 98.

24 Commenting on the Crummell case, Onderdonk stated that ‘I had personally no objections to a colored candidate having the advantages of the Seminary; but that the subject was one of very peculiar delicacy … great prudence was necessary in order to avoid the doing of serious injury to colored persons, where it was intended to benefit them; that considerations of the highest and holiest nature required that the subject should not be allowed to agitate our ecclesiastical bodies’: Colored American, 27 Dec. 1839.

25 The specific number of anti-abolitionist attacks and riots is unclear. Leonard Richards argues that there were 179 anti-abolitionist mobs in America in the 1830s and 1840s, while Michael Feldberg argues that there were 209 such incidents during the same period: Richards, L. L., Gentlemen of property and standing: anti-abolition mobs in Jacksonian America, New York 1970, 14Google Scholar; Feldberg, M., The turbulent era: riot and disorder in Jacksonian America, New York 1980, 5Google Scholar.

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29 Townsend, C. D., Faith in their own color: Black Episcopalians in antebellum New York City, New York 2005, 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peterson, C. L., Black Gotham: a family history of African Americans in nineteenth-century New York City, New Haven 2011, 102Google Scholar. Some scholars have also criticised Williams. Carter Woodson argued that Williams did not appear to have the ‘moral stamina … to renounce his connection with a church seeking to muzzle a man praying for the deliverance of his people’: The history of the Negro Church, Washington, DC 1921, 96Google Scholar. Hodges, Graham argues that Williams suffered ‘public humiliation’ at Onderdonk's hands: David Ruggles: a radical Black abolitionist and the underground railroad in New York City, Chapel Hill, NC 2010, 65Google Scholar.

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33 Reprinted in Woodson, Mind of the negro, 629–34.

34 Onderdonk, B. T., The change at the Resurrection: a sermon preached in St. Philip's Church, New York, on Tuesday, October 20, 1840, at the funeral of the Rev. Peter Williams, the rector of the Church, New York 1840Google Scholar. At the 1840 New York diocesan convention, Onderdonk reported Williams's death, commenting that ‘Mr. Williams added to sincere and enlightened piety, and a grade of talent and theological acquirement quite above mediocrity, great soundness of judgment, and prudence in action, and a just appreciation, a sincere love, and a consistent adoption of sound Christian principles’: Journal of the proceedings of the Fifty-Sixth Convention of the diocese of New York … 1840, New York 1840, 77Google Scholar.

35 Cited in Peterson, Black Gotham, 211.

36 Eric Foner notes that by the 1830s merchants, boat companies, banks, insurance companies, clothing manufacturers and printers all had established links with Southern slavery. The city also became a major tourist destination for Southerners, with at least 100,000 visiting the city each summer. As a result hotels such as the Astor, Fifth Avenue and Metropolitan ‘made special efforts to cater to southerners’: Gateway to freedom: the hidden history of America's fugitive slaves, Oxford 2015, 45–6Google Scholar.

37 Richards, Gentlemen, 134–7, 145–6.

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39 Morning Herald, 23 Oct. 1839.

40 Townsend, Faith, 67.

41 Wilder, ‘“Driven”’, 178.

42 Townsend, Faith, 67.

43 Wilder, ‘“Driven”’, 173–4, 177. Journals of the General Conventions of the Protestant Episcopal Church highlight how the seminary was reliant on Southern support. At the 1838 convention, South Carolina had donated over $12,000 to the seminary, while Maryland donated over $5,500, and North Carolina over $4,000: Journals of the proceedings of the bishops, clergy, and laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America… 1838, New York 1838, 126Google Scholar.

44 Cynthia Lyerly notes that the pews in Anglican churches were filled by rank, with the wealthiest and most prominent families seated near the parson: Methodism and the Southern mind, Oxford 1998, 81Google Scholar.

45 See Fox-Genovese, E. and Genovese, E., The mind of the master class: history and faith in the Southern slaveholders’ worldview, Cambridge 2005, 444, 465CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his study of Episcopalians in North Carolina Richard Rankin highlights that men were intransigent towards the denomination and refused to become communicants. As a result, by 1840, female communicants outnumbered male communicants by a ratio of 4.7:1: Ambivalent churchmen and Evangelical churchwomen, Columbia 1993, 53Google Scholar. Kenneth Startup argues that throughout the antebellum era clergymen were concerned that slaveholders had too high an appetite for economic gain, which ‘was leading to a deadly indifference toward higher, spiritual things’: ‘“A mere calculation of profits and loss”: the Southern clergy and the economic culture of the antebellum North’, in Noll, M. A. (ed.), God and mammon: Protestants, money, and the market, 1790–1860, Oxford 2001, 218Google Scholar.

46 Journal of the proceedings of the Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the diocese of Virginia … 1833, Richmond 1833, 31Google Scholar.

47 F. R. Hanson to William Marbury, 29 Jan. 1839 (private collection), cited in Wyatt-Brown, B., Southern honor: ethics and behavior in the Old South, Oxford 1983, 188Google Scholar. In his sermon at the 1824 General Convention for the Episcopal Church in North Carolina, Bishop Ravenscroft complained that Episcopalians were too generous in donating money to other denominations and that they should reserve ‘pecuniary means … for the wants of our own communion’, rather than contribute to others and show ‘equal regard for all denominations’: London, L. F. and Lemmon, S. M. (eds), The Episcopal Church in North Carolina, 1701–1959, Raleigh, NC 1987, 126Google Scholar.

48 Rankin comments that, to succeed, an Episcopal clergyman had to satisfy two powerful groups in the congregation: avoid conflict with the powerful men who sat on the vestry and satisfy the needs of his female communicants, ‘or the ladies would desert the pews and leave the church empty’: Ambivalent churchmen, 54–5. Startup highlights that there were occasions where Episcopal clergymen were willing to criticise slaveholders. However, the evidence that Startup uses, particularly in the 1820s and ’30s when the denomination was still fragile, illustrates that clergymen were reluctant to criticise slaveholders directly. Instead, the criticisms came through anonymous articles in the Southern Churchman, or through sermons delivered at diocesan conventions rather than from church pulpits: The root of all evil: the Protestant clergy and the economic mind of the Old South, Athens, Ga 1997, 14, 15, 53Google Scholar. Ministers such as John Ravenscroft and Richard Moore, who were financially secure, were more willing to criticise slaveholders directly: Startup, Root of all evil, 53, 119.

49 Dalcho, Frederick, Practical considerations founded on the Scriptures relative to the slave population of South-Carolina, Charleston 1823, 34Google Scholar.

50 Journal of the proceedings of the bishops, clergy, and laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America … 1823, New York 1823, 42Google Scholar.

51 Journal of the Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the diocese of Virginia …1836, Richmond, Va 1836, 29Google Scholar.

52 Journal of the proceedings of the 47th Annual Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the diocese of South-Carolina … 1836, Charleston, SC 1836, 13Google Scholar. In 1842 William Whittingham, the Episcopal bishop of Maryland, stated that ‘I loathe and abhor the spirit of abolitionism as it has developed itself at the North … The evils attendant on slavery are aggravated, not cured, by its intervention’: Brand, W. F., Life of William Rollinson Whittingham, fourth bishop of Maryland, New York 1883, i. 264Google Scholar.

53 See, for example, Freeman, G. W., The rights and duties of slave-holders: two discourses, delivered on Sunday, November 27, 1836 in Christ Church, Raleigh, North-Carolina, Charleston 1837, 12Google Scholar.

54 Cited in Moses, Crummell, 38.