God, in His merciful providence had afforded another opportunity for counsel, for pause, for appeal to Him for assistance before letting loose upon the land the direst scourge which He permits to visit a people—civil war.
—Rev. Phineas Gurley
Rev. Charles Henry Hall of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany had led the Peace Conference’s funeral for Judge Wright. He also was one of at least twelve Washington, DC, clergy who opened the convention on one of eighteen days when prayer was recorded in the journal. These clergy’s stories and churches illustrate the state of religion in 1861 America, especially in the nation’s capital, where the clergy, as public men of education and status, held political influence and were commonly incorporated into affairs of state. Religion, and especially its understanding of the Bible as it related to slavery, was central to the impending conflict that the Peace Conference strove to avoid.
Kentucky’s Charles Wickliffe proposed opening each day with prayer; the “clergymen of the city of Washington be requested to perform that service.”1
Nearly all of these dozen clergy who appeared at the Peace Conference were mostly nonpolitical in their sermons and ministry. Yet nearly all had famous and powerful men in their congregations, whom they influenced. They also operated socially at venues where members of Congress and the cabinet, as well as the president, would appear. All had views about the Union and slavery, and their denominations each struggled deeply with those issues, some of them having already long since divided over them. At the Peace Conference, all the clergy prayed for peace and national unity. Not least of them was Reverend Hall, a Georgian who strove to remain loyal to the Union even after his native state had just seceded.
The easy exchange of clergy at the Peace Conference even as the nation crumbled illustrated an underlying religious collaboration across denominations. Washington’s clergy and churches had long loaned one another sanctuary space during renovations or natural disasters, besides cooperating in helping the city’s needy or even evangelistic revivals. A Catholic priest good-naturedly contributed toward a neighboring Presbyterian church’s building fund, with a smile specifying it was for the sidewalk, since he couldn’t fund a Protestant sanctuary. Reverend Hall, in an 1864 sermon to his diocese, wondered if denominations couldn’t “separate the metaphysical question from their ideas of churchly life, and each holding on its grounds of relative worth to their profound convictions, could unite with one Church Catholic and Apostolic, as brothers in deed and in truth; that in place of us here, a few men holding our banner for certain ideas of unity, we should gather in one grand assembly the sweet persuasive eloquence of our Arminian Methodists, the skill and majestic subtlety in grace of our Calvinist denominations, the practical self-denying humility of many of the followers of the Vatican, and behold our idea of unity realized in practical effect?”2
Hall’s Church of the Epiphany on G Street was only two blocks away from Willard Hall on F Street. The church congregation dated to 1842, first meeting in a public lecture hall south of Pennsylvania Avenue, then constructing its gothic sanctuary in 1843 and 1844. It was the fourth Episcopal congregation in the city and created especially to appeal to lower-income Washingtonians who couldn’t afford the often-high pew rental fees at the other churches. St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House, dating to 1816 and frequent worship place for presidents, was only four blocks away. Most of Epiphany’s first members had come from St. John’s with its rector’s blessings. When a donor contributed the G Street property for the new sanctuary, the proximity to St. John’s created some initial tensions. Pews seating four people sold between $50 and $150, less than half the original prices years before at St. John’s. Nearby were F Street Presbyterian Church in what would later become Willard Hall, Second Presbyterian on the site of what later became New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, and Foundry Methodist Church.3
By the time of the Peace Conference there were forty-three white churches in Washington and nine black churches.4 Reverend Hall became the new rector at Epiphany in 1856, coming from a church near Charleston, South Carolina. He was then a thirty-six-year-old widower, who would marry again shortly after coming to Epiphany. He had attended Yale, where he “renounced Presbyterian doctrine” despite his mother’s “strict Presbyterian faith.” Afterward he attended an Episcopal seminary in New York and served churches in New York, including chaplaincy at the US military academy at West Point, where doubtless he met many of the future protagonists on both sides of the Civil War. Although a native Georgian and strong Democrat, he was a staunch Unionist. He was described as having “fine literary taste and great beauty of diction,” a “man of athletic build and energy,” at home everywhere, broad-minded, tolerant, and sympathetic, yet loyal to his own convictions, a “lover of the outdoors,” and someone who “loved life and people.” Hall was a low church Episcopalian.5
Shortly before the Peace Conference, the previously unadorned Epiphany Church added a new “lofty” bell tower, whose bell would eventually be melted down for Civil War military use. There were also stained glass windows added for more than $1,000, along with a gas chandelier and other light fixtures. A new organ was installed that was comparable in size to the city’s St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, performing with the choir Rossini’s oratorio Moses in Egypt as a fund-raiser to retire church debt.
New sets of pews were sold for between $80 and $230, with the first offered to US Senator Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina. The church supported a mission church in the somewhat dangerous neighborhood south of Pennsylvania Avenue, and also an Epiphany Church Home to extend “relief to the sick and the poor, the ignorant and the destitute,” which included help for orphans, the unemployed, and youth “tempted to form idle or dissolute habits.” By the time of the Peace Conference, this home had been consolidated with the social welfare ministry of Washington’s other Episcopal churches.6
During the years before the Civil War, Epiphany Church had a small number of black communicants, and its services included baptizing and marrying blacks. In 1857 the church had a segregated black Sunday school with forty students and six teachers.7
In 1860, Reverend Hall joined the Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota to meet with a Southern federal official on behalf of Indian tribes, during which the official predicted Southern secession. Reputedly Hall angrily responded: “If you go out of the Union, it will be because God has permitted you to be stone blind, and slavery will be doomed. It will be a righteous retribution. We have married men and women at the altar, and have separated them on the auction block, and Christian men have not dared to call it a sin.8
Early in the war, Church of the Epiphany became a regular worship spot for many Union soldiers, including the president’s mounted guard. Military chaplains sometimes preached from the pulpit. Soldiers served as the choir.9 When the war began, Reverend Hall offered to “go his way quietly” if the church disapproved of a Southern clergyman. If asked to remain he promised to avoid politics and preach “Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” But politics were hard to avoid altogether in such times. Jefferson and Varina Davis had asked that a plaque mark their pew after their departure for the South, which Hall honored, but the plate was soon and unsurprisingly stolen after Davis became president of the Confederacy. Like some other Washington clergy, Hall tried to demur from saying prayers during worship for Union battle victories, not wanting to further divide his congregation, but he finally agreed at his bishop’s request. The neighborhood around Church of the Epiphany included Southern sympathizers, and Hall tried to uphold his pledge to avoid unnecessary controversy. One adamantly pro-Union young Episcopal deacon who also worked at the US Navy Department during the war found Hall’s policy of avoidance unacceptable, successfully asking the bishop for his own transfer to St. John’s Episcopal Church. “The events of the present week render it impossible for me to retain my place at the Navy Department and continue to assist the Rector at the Parish of the Epiphany,” the young deacon explained in early July 1862. “I must cease to have any connection to him,” meaning Hall. During 1862 Epiphany was one of eleven churches in the city converted to hospital use for wounded soldiers, to which the vestry “cheerfully” agreed. During those months of the “Epiphany Hospital,” the congregation worshipped at nearby Foundry Methodist Church or Willard Hall, until regaining its own sanctuary in early 1863.10
Before closing as a hospital in 1862, Church of the Epiphany hosted a large official funeral for a prominent Union general, with a full military procession arrayed outside the church and President Lincoln among the mourners. Weddings continued at the church during the war, including one attracting a “throng of fashionable carriages” for an army officer and the niece of President Zachary Taylor.11
After he became war secretary, Edwin Stanton reputedly expressed concern that Hall was a Southern sympathizer, prompting Hall to hurry to Stanton’s office, where he reportedly exclaimed: “Mr. Stanton, I am a Southern man. I am a Southern sympathizer, and I would be a brute if I were not. My misguided friends are being killed. I am a Christian and loyal to the government that keeps a roof over my head. When I cannot be loyal, I will ask you to put me in Fort Lafayette. Is that satisfactory?” More than satisfied, Stanton, according to the story, replied: “Dr. Hall, have you any pews to rent in your church? If you have, you can count on me as a parishioner as long as I live in Washington.” Stanton rented Jefferson Davis’s vacant pew, prompting Hall to recall Stanton as a “true and great friend of Epiphany,” whose worship there solidified Epiphany’s pro-Union loyalty. Hall would be among four clergy who presided over Lincoln’s White House funeral.12
On Easter Sunday the day after Lincoln’s death, Hall preached on the spiritual lessons of the assassination for the nation: “We are not the Christian people I wish and pray we may be; we are in many things too careless and profane; we have too often forgotten God, and neglected too many of the duties that we owe Him; but there is yet a deep consciousness under all these visible faults of character, which will suffice to carry us through these dangers.”13
Of Lincoln, Hall carefully noted: “I would that he had been a church member in all the proprieties of our appointed modes of thought. But I wish yet the same of very many of you . . . he has always declared himself to be a believer in the Christian religion. He has, beyond question, believed himself to be an appointed apostle of the rights of man, as he conceived them. And then, with his heart full of the grand principle of reconciliation and peace, I can leave him to the mercy of Him Who is the Resurrection and the Life, and to Whom we too shall appeal for mercy, rather than justice.”14
Of Lincoln’s assassins, Hall implored: “May He give repentance to the wretched criminals who have stained their hands wantonly and stupidly with innocent blood, before they are called upon to meet the just punishment of their atrocities.”15
Hall apparently abandoned his aversion to politics later in life while pastoring churches in New York, where he befriended famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher. A New York obituary recalled Hall had “stood for all that was good in the Democratic Party,” believing there “were times when religion owed a duty to politics and frequently took an active part in campaigns.” Hall’s obituary in a Washington newspaper in 1895, recalling the “stormy period” of his years at Church of the Epiphany, described his writing and speaking as “lucid and direct,” and his sermons “conversational.” The placing of a plate marking Jefferson Davis’s pew had ignited a “storm of indignation” and questions about his loyalty, it noted, but War Secretary Stanton “always stood ready to vouch for his rector’s loyalty.”16
PYNE AT ST. JOHN’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH
No less pro-Union was Rev. Dr. Smith Pyne of prestigious St. John’s Episcopal Church, where he had served since 1845. Pyne prayed at the Peace Conference on February 7, when he was age fifty-eight. He was born in Ireland and grew up in South Carolina, although he studied at seminary and was ordained in New York City. Pyne had baptized and buried former First Lady Dolley Madison in the 1840s, and he had presided over the White House funeral of President Zachary Taylor in 1850.17 In 1852, during the presidential campaign of General Winfield Scott, Pyne defended Scott’s contested devotion to the church, based on their twenty-six-year “intimate acquaintance.” Scott attended St. John’s Church for eight years during that friendship, evincing that the general was “much attached to the Protestant Episcopal Church,” and that “nothing but the most imperious necessity ever prevents his attendance upon the worship of that church” on Sunday. Pyne insisted the whole congregation could testify to Scott’s “decorous and devout attention to the public services,” which Pyne wanted known not because he participated in “any politics” but as a “mere act of justice.”18 After the election, Pyne officiated the wedding of US Attorney General John Crittenden, who would be prominent as a US senator in the 1861 peace negotiations. Attending celebrants included General Scott and the man who had just electorally defeated him, president-elect Franklin Pierce, with much of official Washington. Crittenden’s fellow Kentuckian, incoming US Treasury secretary James Guthrie, was a prominent future leader at the Peace Conference, as were many others present that day.19
In 1859 Pyne testified in the infamous murder trial of his occasional parishioner, New York Democratic congressman Daniel Sickles, who had shot his wife’s lover in Lafayette Park just steps away from Pyne’s church. Pyne had spotted Sickles the day before the killing, looking “very peculiar.” Sickles of course would also figure prominently in the events of early 1861 and beyond.20
St. John’s Episcopal opened for worship in 1816, just two years after the White House and other government buildings were burned by the British. Every president since James Madison had attended there at least once. James Monroe, as an Episcopalian, was there routinely. John Quincy Adams was not Episcopalian but still frequently attended. President Andrew Jackson, a Presbyterian, started attending St. John’s after his public feud with his pastor at Second Presbyterian Church over the virtue of the war secretary’s wife in the infamous Eaton Affair. That pastor had sided with much of official Washington in shunning Mrs. Eaton because of her alleged loose morals as a Washington tavern keeper’s daughter before her marriage. Presidents Martin Van Buren and William Henry Harrison were regular worshippers at St. John’s, the latter having planned to join the church before his untimely death. His successor, John Tyler, worshipped regularly there and purchased a pew whose purpose was to remain permanently as a presidential seat. Zachary Taylor, another short-lived president, was a regular there, as was Millard Fillmore. Presidents James Polk, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan were Presbyterians who sometimes attended services at St. John’s.21
At least one Episcopal rector in the federal city was skeptical of the Union and refused, after Lincoln’s inauguration, to pray for the new president, quitting Washington for churches in Richmond, Virginia. But Reverend Pyne was stalwartly Unionist before and during the war, prompting one St. John’s parishioner to complain to the local Episcopal bishop about Pyne’s “violent political sermons” that were “so insulting” that some church members were leaving. Pyne also opened his pulpit to US Army chaplains during the war. Pyne’s grandson would later recall, not entirely accurately, that his grandfather had “practically stood alone, among the clergy of that city, in his strong support for the Union during the Civil War,” “in spite of the fact that his people were from South Carolina—an Irishman not ‘against the government.’ ” On Sunday, February 24, 1861, during the Peace Conference and shortly after his arrival in Washington, Lincoln was taken to worship at St. John’s by his future secretary of state William Seward. They sat in Seward’s pew, although Pyne did not realize Lincoln was in the congregation until shaking hands at the conclusion.22 In May he presided over the White House funeral of Lincoln’s beloved close subordinate Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, who was shot removing a Confederate flag from a Virginia tavern within telescope view of the White House. Both Lincoln and his wife wept during the ceremony, as Pyne implored, according to a Washington newspaper, that “peace might be restored to our once happy country, but not at the expense of the great principles of justice and equality, upon which this great government was founded.”23
BUTLER OF TRINITY CHURCH
The third Episcopal clergy who appeared at the Peace Conference was Clement Butler of Trinity Church. Trinity stood about thirteen blocks from Willard’s and was founded in 1828, counting among its members great statesmen like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Trinity’s twin gothic spires, built in 1851, arose amid largely empty lots, silhouetted against the unfinished Capitol dome and surrounding construction debris. At age fifty, Butler had recently returned for his second appointment to Trinity’s pastorate. He prayed with the peace delegates on either February 8 or 23. (C. H. Chittenden’s minutes of the Peace Conference do not distinguish between the two prominent Washington, DC, clergy named “Butler” who likely appeared.) He had previously been chaplain to the US Senate and had eulogized Henry Clay and John Calhoun. Butler also had served a Cincinnati church attended by Salmon Chase. In 1852 Chase had attended a White House dinner with President Fillmore that included Butler, then Senate chaplain and Trinity’s rector. Also in attendance was later peace delegate Reverdy Johnson. After the dinner Chase brought Butler home for more conversation. In 1855 he preached in Cincinnati on the “highway to redemption,” which his parishioner Chase thought “good.”24
Butler also preached the funeral sermon for President Zachary Taylor in 1850. Taylor’s death had propelled Fillmore to the presidency. In his sermon, Butler explained that “we are taught by the career and character of our departed President, that those qualities which win wide and permanent admiration and regard are moral qualities.” He hoped this “sad dispensation has been marked by incidents and feelings which should inspire us with new hopes for the union and peace of our beloved land.” Butler also noted that the “quiet transfer of the vast power of the Executive without murmur, remonstrance, or excitement, is evidence that we love our Constitution and our laws.” With sentiments that would perhaps inform his Peace Conference prayer, Butler hoped “however local interests may temporarily alienate our affections, we love one another . . . [and] the nation has been made to feel that it indeed is one,” as “one broad and undivided Republic.” He implored: “God grant it may be so; for civilization, liberty, prosperity, peace, religion, and the hopes of coming millions hang trembling on the issue.” Exploiting the spiritual opportunity of a grieving nation, Butler was also pleadingly evangelistic, warning:
Let us then prepare for that life beyond the present, which God, in his mercy, has provided for the penitent and believing and obedient. If we are in Christ, we may be ready for the hour of death and the day of judgment—Are you yet young? Is your “half a tale” that is just begun? Oh, ennoble all its incidents, and give to its progress a healthful and happy character, by connecting with it now, and weaving into it, as the pervading element of its power and beauty, the name of your Savior! Are you more advanced in life? Has the story of your existence become complicated and tedious with petty incidents and common-place events; and do you, with listless indifference, turn page after page of the life-tale on which frivolity, unrest, and inanity are written? Be assured it will be so even to the end, if there be not introduced upon it a name of power at the name of your Savior. Then the narrative which crept shall soar! Then the scene of your being, the object of your life, the end towards which you tend, will all become glorified and changed. Is old age upon you? Is the story of your life almost ended? Are the last words of it falling on the ear of your friends and of the world? Have the characters which figured in its earlier or later chapters, dropped off one by one the playmates of your childhood, the parents of your youth, the children of your maturity, the actors with you in the stirring scenes of middle life have they departed, and left you to totter off the stage desolate and alone? Ah! What is there then left for you, but to close up the story of your mortal life with the experience of a Savior’s love?25
BUTLER OF ST. PAUL’S LUTHERAN CHURCH
The other Reverend Butler who prayed at the Peace Conference was Rev. John George Butler of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. After the war, he would become chaplain to the US House of Representatives and to the US Senate. St. Paul’s was founded in 1842. Known as the English-speaking Lutheran church, it was located at Eleventh and H Streets, about five blocks from Willard’s. John Butler was only thirty-five years old, from Western Maryland, with an illustrious ministerial career ahead of him. It started with attendance at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, whose stately brick building with an observation widow’s nest atop was occupied and fully exploited by both Northern and Southern forces during the great battle. The seminary served as a hospital for the war’s final patients even over four months later when Lincoln delivered his address at the nearby cemetery.
Butler came to the federal capital and his pastorate at St. Paul’s in 1843. The relatively new church was in “deplorable condition,” heavily mortgaged and with a tiny congregation. The church revived under his leadership. In the days preceding the war, Butler “declared himself squarely for the government and against secession,” as one biography recounts. Some of his congregation quit in protest while others “rallied” to him, with the church ultimately growing. During the war he was chaplain to a Pennsylvania regiment while continuing his pastorate at St. Paul’s. He also worked as a chaplain to military hospitals, ministering to both Northern and Southern wounded. His church was filled to “overflowing” by war’s end. At that point, Butler helped found two new Lutheran congregations in Washington, including Memorial Lutheran and what became Thomas Circle Lutheran Church, “in memorial for God’s goodness in delivering the nation from slavery and from war.” He eventually pastored Memorial Church and helped erect the large statue of Martin Luther clutching the Bible that prominently stands outside Thomas Circle Church overlooking the traffic circle. Butler also taught at the seminary at Howard University for black students.26
More than fifty-five years a pastor in Washington, Butler was known for “sanctified common sense” and commitment to social reform, which included not only devotion to the Union and opposition to slavery but also founding a Lutheran church for blacks.27
When celebrating St. Paul’s twentieth anniversary after the war, Butler asked: “Has God used us to further the cause of truth and righteousness in this capital of the nation?” And he wondered, darkly, “how many during all these years have rejected Jesus and hardened themselves in unbelief and worldliness?” On a more hopeful note, he wondered what his congregation could not accomplish for the “Master” if they would accept their divinely appointed responsibility “amid the corrupting influences of this great, growing metropolis.” He recalled that St. Paul’s had nearly died thanks to the “indifference of some, the opposition and slander of others . . . but the gates of hell have not prevailed.” More than a few had “assumed the fearful responsibility in turning away from this pulpit, by reason of its loyalty to truth, to freedom, to the great principles of this Holy Word, the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” The gospel applies to “every relation of life,” he affirmed, citing the “domestic, social, civil and ecclesiastical.” Butler said “men have regarded me as their enemy because I have told them the truth.” Yet through “trying years” he stood “firmly,” fighting “battles of freedom—the freedom wherewith Christ makes free.”
“We stand here near the nation’s heart, and the influence of the pulpit of this city is felt everywhere throughout the land and the world,” Butler concluded. “The hope of the government is in the Gospel; the Gospel that enlightens and liberates and restrains and sanctifies and saves.” With his opposition to slavery in mind, he declared, “The sentiments of the nation, so long dwarfed and distorted by legalized bondage, cannot be purified save by the diffusion of the whole Gospel.”28
EDWARDS OF FOUNDRY METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH
Four days after Butler’s prayer at the Peace Conference, Rev. William Edwards of Foundry Methodist Episcopal Church opened the Peace Conference with his invocation on February 13. Foundry Church stood just one block north from Willard’s, and one block east from the massively columned US Treasury Department still under construction and emerging next to the White House. It was the closest sanctuary to the Peace Conference after Church of the Epiphany, with which it shared a block on G Street. It was first founded on that site in 1815, only a year after Washington’s burning. The property was donated by a devout English Methodist lay preacher and successful businessman whose foundry in the city produced cannons for the US military. Possibly his donation came in thanks for the providential sparing of his foundry from the invading British. The church was likely named after both the founding donor’s business and John Wesley’s London headquarters church, the Foundry. Although it had been refurbished in the previous decade, even gaining a marble pulpit of which old-style Methodists disapproved, in 1861 it was still a plain brick sanctuary, not yet the ornate temple it became even as the Civil War still raged. During the 1864–1865 rebuilding, the congregation worshipped at Reverend Hall’s Church of the Epiphany, while Sunday school convened at Reverend Gurley’s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. Foundry belonged to the denomination of Northern Methodism, Southern Methodists having created their own denomination in a schism over slavery in 1844.29
Edwards was ordained in 1859, and only became Foundry’s pastor in 1860. He would leave in 1862, having presided over a membership drop from 268 to 203, although he was described as a good preacher and was highly educated, knowing five languages. It was in 1863 that famed Methodist Bishop Matthew Simpson electrified Foundry with his preaching, attracting on one Sunday President Lincoln, Treasury Secretary Chase, Secretary of State William Seward, War Secretary Stanton, and Iowa US Senator James Harlan, who like Chase had been a peace delegate. Over the decades Foundry Church had supported African colonization of freed slaves without supporting abolitionism. During his pastorate and afterward, Reverend Edwards was involved with pledges of support for the Union. In 1863 Lincoln’s secretary thanked him for the “expression of piety and patriotism” by local Methodists. In 1864 Edwards was among several clergy who persuaded local Methodists toward formal support of the federal government in war and peace, rejection of any new disloyal clergy, and opposition to slavery.30
STOCKTON OF GEORGETOWN
Another Methodist who prayed at the Peace Conference was the Reverend Thomas H. Stockton, who pastored a church in the Georgetown area of Washington, DC, and became chaplain of the US House of Representatives in March 1861, just after the Peace Conference closed. He had already served several times in that capacity in the 1830s. He also had pastored Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Baltimore churches, and he was an editor of a church magazine. Stockton had started his career as an itinerant preacher on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He had helped found the Methodist Protestant denomination, which split off from the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1830 in protest over the authority of bishops, among other disputes. Most notably, Stockton delivered the “eloquent and thrilling invocation” at the dedication ceremony for Gettysburg Cemetery in 1863, where Lincoln delivered his famed address. That prayer reveals Stockton’s thoughts on the Union and slavery.31
The Prayer
Oh God! Our Father, for the sake of Thy Son, Our Saviour, inspire us with Thy spirit and sanctify us to the right fulfillment of the duties of this occasion. We come to dedicate this new historic centre as a National Cemetery.
Oh, had it not been for God! for lo! our enemies came unresisted, multitudinous, mighty, flushed with victory, and sure of success. . . . They prepared to cast the chain of slavery around the form of Freedom, and to bind life and death together forever.
One more victory, and all was theirs; but behind these hills was heard the feebler march of a smaller but still pursuing host; onward they hurried, day and night, for their country and God; footsore, wayworn, hungry, thirsty, faint—but not in heart—they came to dare all, bear all, and to do all that is possible to heroes.
At first they met the blast on the plain, and bent before it like the trees; but then led by Thy hand to these hills, they took their stand upon these rocks and remained as firm and immovable as they. In vain they assaulted; all arts, all violence, all desperation failed to dislodge them. Baffled, bruised, and broken, their enemies retired and disappeared.
But Oh, the slain, in the freshness and fullness of their young and manly life; with such sweet memories of father and mother, brother and sister, wife and children, maiden and friend; from the coasts beneath the eastern star, from the shores of the northern lakes and rivers; from the homes of the midway and the border, they came here to die for us and for mankind.
Bless the bereaved, whether absent or present. Bless our sick and wounded soldiers and sailors. Bless all our rulers and people; Bless our army and navy. Bless the efforts to suppress the rebellion, and bless all the associations of this day, and the place and the scene forever.
Reverend Stockton concluded with the Lord’s Prayer, during which he was “spontaneously joined by almost the entire multitude, whose feelings seemed most deeply solemnized during the offering up of the devout and the sublime prayer that had preceded it.”32
Stockton’s intense Unionism and patriotism were demonstrated further in one of several hymns he wrote, called “In The Name of Jehovah Our Banner We Raise,” described as a “national hymn.” It unapologetically celebrated the American flag for “its stars and its stripes,” as an “ensign of truth” and “standard of right,” as well as the “herald of liberty, union, and right.” It points to “one sky and one land,” both “harmonious and free,” from the “north to the south, from the east to the west, with no treason to part it, no war to molest.” And it hopes the “down-trodden nations in triumph may rise, with their feet on their chains, and their brows to the skies.”33
Offering his prayer at the Peace Conference on February 21, Stockton must have cut quite a figure. A colleague later poetically recalled Stockton as “tall slender, yet majestic; graceful in every motion, with a dignity and gravity that awed us into solemn silence, as his large blue eyes rolled in their orbits seeming to visit with a glance each and every auditor. Hark! That voice speaking so solemnly, so beautifully, such correctness of elocution, that each word has its relative volume of sound; with its strange and unheard sweetness, thrilling your every nerve with like the low murmur of the wind in pine tree tops.”34
A Baltimore native, Stockton was raised Methodist but turned more devoutly to God after his beloved mother’s death, joining famed St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, one of Methodism’s earliest congregations. After working in printing and studying medicine, he preached his first sermon in 1829 in the countryside outside Philadelphia. His circuit riding sometimes took him on two-hundred-mile trips, when he often preached thrice on the Sabbath, sometimes to “immense” congregations. He also wrote devotional books and poetry in addition to his hymnody.
“Our departed brother burned with divine love and with lustrous genius and grace,” Stockton’s eulogist declared, comparing him to John the Baptist for opposing “sectarian bigotry and ecclesiastical monopoly,” the “one great Christ the one great Bible as sufficient for the fellowship and of all the churches and for the salvation of the world.” The eulogist insisted Stockton was an orator “without a rival in the American pulpit,” moving “congregations as the wind moves the trees.” Henry Clay himself, as a “prince of orators,” had called Stockton the “most eloquent man in America.” Indeed, “his smile was eloquent; his tears were eloquent; his very infirmity of body was eloquent.” Even in his final days, he professed that “All I can say just now is, that, if I die, I wish to die as a Christian: nothing more, nothing less—a Christian, an humble disciple of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; to be acknowledged by him, I trust, through grace. . . .”35
SMITH OF FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Stockton was one of two Methodists who prayed at the Peace Conference, and there were at least three Episcopalians. But Presbyterians were the most common, with at least four appearing at Willard Hall in February 1861. Rev. John C. Smith of Fourth Presbyterian Church, known as the “church builder,” had planted numerous other Presbyterian congregations in Washington, DC, over the decades. Fourth Presbyterian dated to 1828, with Smith becoming pastor in 1839. Realizing a new sanctuary was needed, he preached on Nehemiah 2:18: “And they said, ‘Let us rise up and build.’ ” This resulted in the city’s then largest church building, measuring sixty-one feet by eighty feet. It was at Ninth and I Streets, about half a mile from Willard’s.36
President Tyler and his cabinet were present in 1841 for the new Fourth Presbyterian Church’s dedication, with “the seats . . . all filled, and the aisles and the pulpit-platform crowded,” as Smith later boasted, also noting he had already raised the needed funds, so it was “paid for and made meet for their Master’s use, to offer unto Him this their free gift.” Himself “tall and spare and frail,” Smith called the church’s then remote location a “land of gullies and marshes,” which later transitioned into a bustling neighborhood. In 1845 President Polk and the First Lady would entertain Reverend Smith at the White House, along with the Sunday school of his Fourth Presbyterian Church. In 1855, Smith would recall that his church had been founded in a very different Washington, the “number of churches, population, and resources of the city” having “increased more than threefold” in twenty-eight years. The streets were not even graded, much less paved, and “houses very few and widely scattered and the people in the neighborhood in very moderate circumstances.” He boasted that the building of their church had “promoted the interests of landholders in this section of the city more than anything that had previously been done” in what was almost a “wilderness.” He admitted even in 1855, the street was still “the receptacle of every kind of rubbish that any one may choose to throw in.” Yet he confidently exclaimed that “the building of church edifices is the most direct means of improvement a city can have, and in this respect we have done not a little.”37
It was said that Smith was “born [and] living among the colored people,” always “deeply interested in their welfare.” Several years before his arrival at Fourth Presbyterian, the congregation had defeated an effort to shut down its controversial school for black children in deference to “public opinion.” Smith continued that policy and was, although a Southerner, an “intense Union man,” taking no “council from flesh and blood.” He immediately offered himself to the US Army at the start of the Civil War, dramatically declaring to his congregation, “I am now ready to be offered.”
Smith offered his church as a military hospital, for which it was used for eight months. Although defiant about his Unionism, he professed to avoid “mooted questions of politics” in his sermons in favor of the Word of God, he explained. The son of a Scots-Irish immigrant, and raised in Baltimore, he studied some at Princeton. He was first licensed to preach in 1828, served a church in Portsmouth, Virginia, and later a church in Georgetown within Washington, DC. “My ministerial life began with the life of this church, to which I have so cheerfully devoted my energies,” he would tell his congregation at Fourth Presbyterian in 1855.38
That year Smith recited his sixteen years of accomplishments to his church; he estimated he had paid nineteen or twenty thousand visits to church members, the sick, the dying, and the bereaved, “most of them on foot, in this city of magnificent distances,” as “no Presbyterian minister in Washington owns either carriage or horse.” He also noted he had rarely missed a funeral or taken more than a few days off, always preaching thrice weekly, “unless some brother is providentially with me,” preaching up to seven times weekly during revival season for weeks. Smith also noted he had never “preached the same sermon, or from the same preparation, twice to the same people or in the same church,” always “joyfully given to this church, to this city, and to the Presbytery of the District of Columbia, that which I can give never again. Freely have I given, and I rejoice that the Master has permitted me to spend and be spent in His service in this Metropolis. All His gifts of mind and heart have I consecrated to God, and offered upon this altar and for your service.”39
Smith boasted that the Sunday school had a library of more than 1,100 volumes and had 210 children, male and female, with 32 teachers. On a fund-raising trip for the church he had “met with the disaster” on a Virginia railroad in 1854, “which disabled me for a season,” including a “violent concussion of the brain.” He recalled that in sixteen years he had received 678 church members, including 400 infant and 64 adult baptisms, while excommunicating 40, with a current membership of 352. He enthused, “Now, let us walk about Zion, and go round about her, that we may tell it to the generation following; for this God is our God for ever and ever: He will be our guide even unto death.”40
In 1876 Smith was likely in his late seventies (he was vague about his age). He was still actively preaching at Fourth Presbyterian until hit by a Washington horse-drawn streetcar. With diminishing powers, he died two years later.41
SUNDERLAND OF FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Rev. Byron Sunderland had been pastor of First Presbyterian Church since 1853 and would remain there forty-five years. He was US Senate chaplain starting in 1861 and was like Reverend Smith a revered clergy figure in Washington. Unsurprisingly, he prayed twice at the Peace Conference, on February 16 and 22, at a relatively youthful age forty-one. His church dated to 1795, though some of its members had peeled off in 1803 to join the new F Street Presbyterian Church that would build what became Willard Hall. The Presbyterian Church’s old sanctuary had arisen on Capitol Hill out of donations from James Madison and James Monroe. The newer church, which could seat 1,000, was built more central to downtown, about one mile from Willard’s. It endured numerous controversies across the years. In 1866 some church members quit when Frederick Douglass lectured at the church about “The Assassination and its Lessons” as a fund-raiser for the National Home Association of colored orphans, with then Chief Justice Salmon Chase present in a racially mixed audience.42 “It was the only church open to him in the city and the event cost us dearly, but it was the prestige for free speech for the colored race in this country.”43
Like many anti-slavery personages, Reverend Sunderland was active in the American Colonization Society. After the war he was also president of what became Howard University, a black college in Washington. He was from Vermont and attended Union Seminary in New York. In 1857 he started preaching against slavery from the pulpit of First Presbyterian. In the postwar years he was pastor to President Grover Cleveland, whom he first opposed, but whose White House marriage he conducted.44
At the start of the Civil War Sunderland preached a stirring call to spiritual arms at a worship service in the US Capitol. “The soldier of Christ must expect to endure hardness, must follow his Captain, must obey His orders, must smite down temptation on every hand, and reach the object of the campaign at every cost,” he proclaimed. “Discipline is the life of the hero. Through this, and only this, he marches to victory. The life to which God calls us is a time-long conflict, from which there is no discharge and no retreat, and from which we may thank God there is none. The true soldier wants none, else he would be willing to turn back from the conquest and the final rewards of triumph.” He made clear his commitment to the Union: “Next to the service of our God is the service we owe our country. The one implies the other. Christianity fosters patriotism.” Sunderland added: “Spiritual religion and free government are both ordained of God. He that is right with his Maker is most likely to be true to the interests of his country in her hour of danger; and therefore, there is a political, yea even a militant, as well as a religious sense, in which the declaration is true, ‘whosoever shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.’ ”45
Sunderland unequivocally denounced Secessionists:
For a long time a certain subtle poison of dissatisfaction and disloyalty to the General Government has been diffusing itself among a portion of the people of our country. The cloud of insubordination has been rising and spreading itself on our political horizon, and the muttering of the thunder of dissolution has been heard until at length a settled plan and purpose to break up this great political structure has been undertaken, and its progress has been fearfully rapid. Forbearance and conciliation have been wrested and perverted to stimulate and encourage this proceeding.
And Sunderland offered fulsome support to President Lincoln and General Winfield Scott:
We cordially approve of the earnest efforts now being made by the President, aided as he is by our war-worn General, the venerable Chieftain of the American people, to preserve the Government and to maintain the Constitution and the laws; and we feel that he has “an oath solemnly recorded in Heaven” to use his best endeavors to this end. We discountenance all efforts from every quarter to interfere with this object. We disapprove of all appeals made to him from whatever motive, to embarrass or cripple him in his work. This is emphatically his work; and therefore to entreat him to desist from it, is to undertake to seduce or to solicit him to perjury. The principle and spirit of my text applies to him and his work, as well as to you and to me and to our work. Our only salvation lies in “enduring to the end.”46
Sunderland commended the “religion of the Cross” as the “only solace which can assuage our sorrows” and a “refuge and support which alone is adequate to life’s solemn undertakings.”47 In 1862 he would meet with President Lincoln, later recounting that after Lincoln’s “joke and fun,” the president had “for one half hour poured forth the deepest volume of Christian philosophy I had ever heard.”48 Sunderland had worried that the president might renege on issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. But after listening to Lincoln by the dim light of a single gas fixture, he thought he sounded like “one of the old prophets,” and Sunderland “went home comforted and uplifted, and I believed in Abraham Lincoln from that day.”49 On April 30, 1863, on a day of national prayer and thanksgiving, Sunderland “preached a sermon of pronounced anti-slavery and anti-secession character,” according to a New York newspaper.50
GURLEY OF NEW YORK AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
The most frequent and prominent clergy who prayed at the Peace Conference was Reverend Gurley of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, who delivered invocations before the delegates at least four times, on February 5, 11, 18, and 27. He both opened and closed the Peace Conference. He was age forty-four, from upstate New York, and had pastored churches in Indiana and Ohio. He arrived in Washington in 1854, quickly gaining a reputation and becoming US Senate chaplain in 1859. He had attended Princeton Theological Seminary and was a loyal student of Old School Presbyterian theologians Charles Hodge and Archibald Alexander, who espoused Calvinist orthodoxy and were skeptical of modern revivalism and most church political activism.51 After the April 12, 1861, firing on Fort Sumter, Gurley preached a typical sermon on God’s sovereignty at New York Avenue Presbyterian with Lincoln in the audience. “God in His merciful providence had afforded another opportunity for counsel, for pause, for appeal to Him for assistance before letting loose upon the land the direst scourge which He permits to visit a people—civil war.” The pastor’s simple, insistent style appealed to the new president. “I like Gurley,” President Lincoln once said. “He don’t preach politics. I get enough of that through the week, and when I go to church, I like to hear the gospel.”52
A journalist observed in 1862 the growing popularity of the New York Avenue church: “Last Sunday [November 30] I saw the President and his wife at church at Dr. Gurley’s (Presbyterian), where they habitually attend. The building was crowded, as usual, with dignitaries of various grades, besides sinners of lesser note and rank. Conspicuous among them all, as the crowd pour out of the aisles, was the tall form of the Father of the Faithful, who is instantly recognized by his likeness to the variety of his published likenesses.”53
Not everyone was an automatic fan of Gurley’s, especially sophisticates who didn’t share Lincoln’s taste for middlebrow Protestantism. In 1865, the Marquis Adolphe de Chambrun, an expatriate French aristocrat, groused: “We had to submit to an hour’s discourse by Dr. Gurley. He has the sort of eloquence belonging to this denomination; that is, no high-sounding phrases but a stock of dry commonplaces marshaled in good order.”54 President Buchanan had also been Gurley’s parishioner, although perhaps more from a policy of simply attending the “nearest” Presbyterian church.55
In a tribute to Gurley’s quickly established reputation in Washington, DC, he was first nominated to become chaplain of the US House of Representatives in 1857, after having been in town for only three years. The nominating congressman made clear he was advancing Gurley’s name “without the knowledge or consent of the gentleman,” describing him as a member of the Old School Presbyterian denomination and distinguished for his social propriety and position, “in politics, as in religion he is a Christian.”
During the rollicking debate, one congressman nominated a female Presbyterian as chaplain, admitting he previously was accused of “being an infidel” when last nominating her, and prompting laughter in the House of Representatives. One member responded: “In view of the injunction of St. Paul for woman to ‘keep silence in the churches,’ I think it would be decidedly out of order.” Another member nominated a “Hardshell Ironside Baptist,” explaining he was a “very pious man, and though not of eminent ability, he has enough talent to pray for such a crowd as this,” prompting more laughter. In the end Gurley came in third place, with 22 votes, losing to a Congregationalist clergy with 106 votes out of 204 cast. But Gurley would become US Senate chaplain two years later.56
Gurley preached a stern Calvinism not uncommon to the era. This appealed especially to Lincoln, who came from a Calvinistic Baptist background, as well as to other leaders in Washington who looked for national purpose in a guiding Providence. Gurley preached at the funeral for Lincoln’s son in 1862: “All those events which in any wise affect our condition and happiness are in His hands, and at His disposal. Disease and health are His messengers; they go forth at His bidding and their fearful work is limited or extended according to the good pleasure of His will.”57
Gurley would preach at Lincoln’s White House funeral:
Though our beloved President is slain, our beloved country is saved. And so we sing of mercy as well as of judgment. Tears of gratitude mingle with those of sorrow. While there is darkness, there is also the dawning of a brighter, happier day upon our stricken and weary land. God be praised that our fallen Chief lived long enough to see the day dawn and the daystar of joy and peace arise upon the nation. He saw it, and he was glad. Alas! alas! He only saw the dawn. When the sun has risen, full-orbed and glorious, and a happy reunited people are rejoicing in its light—alas! alas! it will shine upon his grave. But that grave will be a precious and a consecrated spot. The friends of Liberty and of the Union will repair to it in years and ages to come, to pronounce the memory of its occupant blessed, and, gathering from his very ashes, and from the rehearsal of his deeds and virtues, fresh incentives to patriotism, they will there renew their vows of fidelity to their country and their God.58
SAMSON OF FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH
The only Baptist clergy to pray at the Peace Conference was forty-one-year-old Rev. George W. Samson, pastor of First Baptist Church. He had been president since 1859 of Columbian College in Washington, DC, an originally Baptist school that later became George Washington University. First Baptist Church dated to 1802, and its sanctuary was on Thirteenth Street, very close to Willard’s. Samson became pastor in 1860, serving without pay for several years to help the church revive after a merger. Challenges for the church were compounded by severe hurricane damage in 1862, followed by its temporary seizure for a military hospital, which compelled the congregation to meet for a time at nearby New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. Federal troops were also quartered at Columbian College, and Samson likely was suited to such adversity across his varied career. He was from Massachusetts, of old Puritan stock, studying at Brown University and Newton Theological Seminary. He later taught and pastored several Baptist congregations, but he was maybe best known for his numerous writings against alcohol consumption, including an 1885 work called Divine Law As To Wines, commissioned by both Northern and Southern Baptist Conventions. “The conviction that Jesus did not use intoxicating wine grows with every new development in tracing His life and teaching,” Samson insisted.59
Starting in 1846 Samson had befriended legendary Texas US Senator Sam Houston, who called Samson a “young man, but one of the most able divines, that I have anywhere heard . . . [he] gave us a rich feast on the spiritual and practical duties of the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, I have never heard anything superior—extempore, or written. That he is a pious man, I have no doubt, it is my determination, while we are detained here, to attend his church, as often, as he preaches.”60
Samson was anti-slavery but politically cautious. In September 1861 on a national day of fasting and prayer, a speaker at Samson’s church denounced slavery as an “abomination in the sight of God,” prompting Samson’s pastoral rebuke. Likely Samson agreed with President Lincoln that it was too early in the war for such sharp denunciations from a prominent church, when border slave states and moderate Northern opinion were crucial, not to mention sensitivities in historically Southern Washington, DC.61
BULLOCK OF BALTIMORE
The only clergy who prayed at the Peace Conference who had pronounced pro-Southern and subsequent Confederate sympathies seems to have been forty-eight-year-old Rev. Joseph J. Bullock, a native Kentuckian and Baltimore pastor of southern Presbyterianism. In 1864 he was arrested by military authorities and charged with “harboring a rebel colonel at his house,” who was a relative and fellow native of Kentucky.62 In 1865 he was leading Baltimore Presbyterian clergy in trying to assist southern Presbyterian ministers living in “destitute conditions.”63 As a young man he had pastored a Presbyterian church in Frankfort, Kentucky, where he was recalled as “distinguished and attractive” with a “towering frame.” His parishioners included prominent families such as relatives of Senator Crittenden and Governor Morehead. Morehead was later a peace delegate, which might explain Bullock’s invitation to the Peace Conference.64 He had also as a young man faced down a Kentucky mob set to attack the Ohio abolitionist editor James Birney, while making clear his disagreement with him. He shared that experience with Salmon Chase, who had similarly defended Birney in Cincinnati.65 He studied theology at Princeton and had headed a women’s academy in Kentucky before the Peace Conference. In 1878 Bullock became chaplain of the US Senate and later became the moderator of Southern Presbyterianism.66
Bullock’s relatively quiet pro-Southern sentiments in Baltimore contrasted with many of the other clergy who prayed at the Peace Conference. Most were steadfastly pro-Union, becoming more outspoken as the national crisis progressed. A Louisiana Presbyterian minister was disgusted by much of what he heard from fellow clergy, including several who were at the conference, during his Washington visit, his tart observations appearing in a Presbyterian newspaper:
The religious condition of Washington has sadly deteriorated since the commencement of the war. The political preachers have become more political in their prayers and sermons. You could once hear the gospel in its purity, but he who attends the Church of Dr. Sunderland, or Mr. Noble (a chaplain in the Navy,) or Mr. Brown, who now fills the place of the Rev. Dr. Bocock, will hear tirades upon the wickedness of the South, and harangues upon the glory and power of the pious North. An Elder in Dr. G.—–’s Church said to me—“religion is dead in the Churches; our prayer meetings have been converted into abolition enclaves, and the best class of attendants have ceased to come.”
Mr. Brown has disgusted his congregation, and the Government was compelled to give him a chaplaincy to save him from suffering. Dr. Gurley, up to this time, has continued to give his people the unadulterated gospel, unmixed with the hypocrisy and humanitarianism of Northern fanatics. A lady remarked to me, “It was awful to hear the prayers of blood and imprecation which were sometimes hurled, in the name of God, at the South!” To “crush,” “confound” and “destroy” were no unusual epithets.
Nevertheless, there are a few good and noble spirits who cry day and night for peace. They are sick of the awful scenes of the wounded and dying which Washington City has so often witnessed. Dr. Sampson, a Baptist minister, on the day of our “fasts,” called the attention of the Union Prayer meeting to it, and desired that God would bless the day to our everlasting good. It met with the approbation of some, but Dr. John C. Smith remarked if this was to be converted into a “secesh” meeting he would come no more, and his majesty has since kept at home to curse the South and invoke blessings on the head of President Lincoln. Although I was once a teacher in his Sabbath School, and a member of his congregation, yet I was afraid to attend his church, lest he should recognize and report me to the provost marshal and have me imprisoned. We do trust the prayers of the few righteous will be heard, and that he who is Head over all things to the Church will grant them and us the speedy blessings of peace. Christ does not delight in bloodshed and the horrors of war, therefore they and we may humbly draw nigh and earnestly pray that this dreadful sacrifice of human life be stayed.67
SCHISM IN THE CHURCH
Divisions had been brewing for years along sectional lines in most of the great Protestant denominations. In 1837, after a takeover by orthodox Calvinist Old School Presbyterians, the Presbyterian General Assembly expelled more revivalistic and ecumenical New School Presbyterians, who tended to be more Northern and sometimes abolitionist. New Schoolers had about 1,200 congregations and about 100,000 members, or just under half of the total.68
Old Schoolers looked to Princeton Seminary, while New Schoolers created Union Seminary in New York. Southern Presbyterians had mostly sided with Old Schoolers, with famed Northern preacher Lyman Beecher crediting South Carolina’s US Senator and arch Southern partisan John C. Calhoun for being “at the bottom of it . . . writing to ministers, and telling them to do this and do that. . . . It was a cruel thing . . . and ‘twas slavery that did it.”69
After Methodists and Baptists divided along strictly sectional lines in the 1840s, Presbyterians in the Old School and New School denominations struggled to keep their communions intact. In 1845 Old School Presbyterians carefully affirmed the church as a “spiritual body, whose jurisdiction extends only to the religious faith, and moral conduct of her members,” not able to “legislate where Christ has not legislated.”70
Southern theologian James Henley Thornwell insisted in 1851 that “we deplore a schism in the body of Christ . . . [and] among the confederated states of this Union,” warning that “continued agitation of slavery must sooner or later shiver this government into atoms.” He warned that if slavery was consistent with the Bible, “their responsibility is tremendous, who in obedience to blind impulses and visionary theories, pull down the fairest fabric of government the world has ever seen, rend the body of Christ in sunder, and dethrone the Savior in His own Kingdom.”71
In 1850 the New School Presbyterians reaffirmed an earlier 1818 Presbyterian stance condemning slavery as a “gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature,” and that slave holding should be, with some exceptions, a “matter of church discipline.” In 1857 the New Schoolers overwhelmingly denounced the defense of slavery by some Southern Presbyterians. This prompted twenty-one Southern and border state presbyteries, with 15,000 communicants, to create the United Synod of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.72 In 1861, dominated by Northerners, the New Schoolers assertively declared: “There is no blood or treasure too precious to be devoted to the defense and perpetuity of the government in all its constituted authority.”73
In 1861 Northern Old School theologian Charles Hodge admitted that “we alone retain, this day, the proportions of a national church.” But in May 1861, the Old Schoolers’ general assembly in Philadelphia affirmed support for the federal government, although broadly defined. Southerners predictably withdrew and created the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America in Augusta, Georgia, that December.74 There, theologian Thornwell explained that “political problems” connected with slavery “transcend our sphere” and were not entrusted by God to the church.75 This new Old School denomination of the South affirmed its loyalty to the Confederacy and defended slavery’s moral legitimacy. In 1864 the Southern Old Schoolers merged with the Southern New Schoolers in what became the Presbyterian Church in the United States.76
The Methodist Episcopal Church, representing the country’s largest religious movement, had divided at its 1844 general conference, which voted 110 to 68 to urge a Georgia bishop to “desist from the exercise of his office” so long as he had a “connection” to slavery. This resolution was unacceptable to Southern Methodists, and the general conference organized a relatively orderly sectional division of the denomination. But many saw the fracturing as ominous for the nation. A Virginia Methodist warned that church schism could lead to “civil disunion . . . the North against the South . . . civil war and far-reaching desolation.” But a Southern Methodist publication suggested schism would warn the North of the “limits” of “southern forbearance” toward the “pseudo-religious frenzy called abolitionism,” checking further threats to “political union.”77
Famed Methodist evangelist Peter Cartwright was anti-slavery but not abolitionist, and once had run unsuccessfully against Lincoln for Congress as a Democrat. In 1856 he lamented that “this dreadful rupture of the Methodist Church spread terror over almost every branch of the Church of Christ . . . it shook the pillars of our American government to the center . . . as the fearful step toward the downfall of our happy republic . . . [and] the horrors of civil war.”78
Hoping to avert schism, the 1844 General Convention of Baptists, representing America’s second largest religious group, disclaimed any stance on slavery or anti-slavery, affirming free expression of views. But Baptists from mostly the Deep South objected even to this pronouncement and convened in Augusta, Georgia, in 1845 to create the Southern Baptist Convention. The national ramifications were evident, especially after the Methodist division. Washington, DC, Baptists had warned earlier in 1845 that Baptist schism would “have an unhappy bearing not only on the cause of Christ but upon our national union.”79
In 1850 Southern diehard Senator John Calhoun remarked on the US Senate floor that “the ties that held each denomination together formed a strong cord to hold the whole Union together, but powerful as they were, they have not been able to resist the explosive effect of slavery agitation,” noting only the Episcopal Church of the “four great denominations” yet “remains unbroken and entire.”80
Yet these great denominational divisions seem not to have directly touched the 1861 Peace Conference, at least in terms of clergy who attended and prayed. None of the more than one dozen ministers, except Reverend Bullock, were from the separated Southern branches of fractured denominations. None of the clergy except Bullock were partial to secession or slavery, even though several were decidedly Southern in origins. Yet all the clergy, and the Peace Conference itself, were ultimately responding to a religious disagreement over the morality and spiritual implications of slavery.
A year before, in June 1860, a Washington newspaper reported the sermons from the previous Sunday of several clergy who would appear at the Peace Conference. Foundry Methodist’s Reverend Edwards preached on Christ’s words in John’s gospel, “I am the vine, ye are the branches” (15:5 KJV), emphasizing the organic unity of the body of Christ, with God often slicing off the vines that bear poor fruit. “If God sees something in me which divides my heart or affections by His providence He will take that something away and prune me,” Edwards explained. Meanwhile, Reverend Stockton preached at the US Capitol on Second Corinthians: “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin” (5:21 KJV), in which the Methodist preacher addressed the suffering of the innocent for the sins of the guilty. And Reverend Butler at Trinity Episcopal preached on Christ’s admonition from Mark’s gospel, “Come, take up the cross, and follow me” (10:21 KJV), in which he explained the steep costs of discipleship. All three sermons would be relevant in the city’s and the nation’s troubled days ahead.81