Clergy and laity in the north were increasingly strident in pushing for the abolition of slavery, in the decades leading up to the American Civil War. These abolitionist desires led to splits within denominations. The first occurred during the General Conference of the Methodist Church in 1844 that decided a bishop who enslaved persons “should not exercise his office as long as the situation of slaveholding persisted.” This schism resulted in the creation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
As many influential Episcopalians in the north saw slavery as a political or legal question rather than a moral one, no such rancorous debate took place in our church. When southern states seceded from the Union, the situation changed. In 1861, Bishop Stephen Elliott of Georgia joined Bishop Leonidas Polk of Louisiana in writing a letter to southern dioceses calling for a church council. In that letter, the bishops said, “We rejoice to record the fact, that we are today, as Churchmen, as truly brethren as we have ever been; and that no deed has been done, nor word uttered, which leaves a single wound rankling in our hearts.”
During the 39th Convention of the Diocese of Georgia, held in Macon that same year, Bishop Elliott said of the southern states, “These States are no longer, in any sense, a part of the United States, and consequently the Bishops of these States or Dioceses, for in this connection those words are synonymous, are no longer Bishops of any of the United States. They are now Bishops of the Confederate States.” Expecting the Confederate States to exist in perpetuity, Elliott saw no choice but to create the new denomination and the diocesan convention agreed.
The Diocese of Georgia sent Bishop Elliott, as well as three clergy and three lay delegates to the meeting in Montgomery. Bishop Stephen Elliott, Jr. became the first and only Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America (PECCSA). The Pastoral Letter PECCSA issued said, we southern Episcopalians are “a very large proportion of the great slaveholders of the country” and added, “Hitherto have we been hindered by the pressure of abolitionism; now that we have thrown off from us that hateful and infidel pestilence, we should prove to the world that we are faithful to our trust and the Church should lead the hosts of the Lord in this work of justice and of mercy.”
In November 1862, the first General Council of the church met at Saint Paul’s in Augusta. Most of the bishops in the Confederate States gathered there again in June 1864 as Bishop Elliott preached at the funeral for Bishop Leonidas Polk, who served as a general in the war and died in battle.
Meeting in October of 1865, the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States approved adoption of the actions of the PECCSA including making Arkansas into a diocese and consecrating as bishop Richard Hooker Wilmer in Alabama. The second and final General Council of PECCSA met in Augusta the following month and resolved that any bishop and diocese could, in good faith, vote to rejoin the Episcopal Church. They all did so and the PECCSA came to an end.
Pictured above: Bishop Stephen Elliott (above); Saint Paul’s in Augusta (below).
