By March of 1863, the tragic cost of the American Civil War was keenly felt in the north and south alike. In a single day the previous September, 3,650 soldiers died on the battlefield at Antietam. At home the very real threat of starvation loomed large. An 1862 drought compounded the short supplies caused by sending food to Confederate troops.
President Jefferson Davis declared Friday, March 27th, 1863, to be a Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer. Bishop Stephen Elliott Jr. preached on that occasion at Christ Church, Savannah, “War is a great eater, a fierce, terrible, omnivorous eater. It eats out wealth, property, life…,.it devours religion, and tramples under foot its temples and its altars–it rides in desolation upon the storm of passion and the whirlwind of vengeance.
“With God, of course, all things are possible, and He can, if He chooses, produce such a change in the hearts and feelings of our enemies…But as He always acts through natural means…we can scarcely hope for such a divine intervention.”
On September 15, 1865, Bishop Elliott preached again at Christ Church, Savannah, on a day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer appointed by Georgia’s Governor. The City of Atlanta had fallen to a Union onslaught two weeks earlier. It is hard to read these words from his sermon, yet they provide clarity on how our bishop reconciled his faith with enslaving people in seeing divine purpose in the “peculiar institution”:
“It is a conflict involving the future of a race, whose existence or extinction depends upon its result. The white race of the South, even though subjugated might continue to exist, to live on for a time in shame and degradation, and at last to commingle, as the Anglo-Saxons did, with their Norman conquerors. But the black race perishes with its freedom. They will die out before the encroaching white labor of Europe”
He went on to preach, “If God therefore has any meaning in his past dealings with this race, in permitting it to be brought here, to be preserved, to increase, to be civilized, it is not his purpose that they should be given the liberty which their pretended friends are seeking for them. To protect them, he must protect us, and therefore is it, as I have said again and again, that I have full confidence in the successful termination of this conflict.”
While his views on race are painful to read, Bishop Elliott was seen as progressive by some in his own day. He preached that slaveholders would have to account to God for their treatment of enslaved Africans whose souls were in their care. In his last address to convention in 1866, Elliott called for treating formerly enslaved persons “not now as servants,” but as “brethren beloved” saying, “We have always welcomed them to our churches and altars; let us continue the same. We have permitted them to organize churches for themselves — they have been free as all upon this point; let us continue the same.”
