Page 130 →Page 131 →Chapter 5“Still in Its Bud in Our Every Heart”
Postbellum Multiethnic Worship in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865–74
After the Civil War and during Reconstruction “freedpersons continued to find in their churches solace from the cares of the world and joy and a purpose for living in a society that continued to oppress black people.”1 This was certainly true of newly freed African American communities in Charleston, South Carolina, after the Civil War. While many African American congregants left their old antebellum churches, Zion continued to have African American members attend. John Boles argued that “Blacks in significant numbers—eventually all of them—began to move out of the biracial churches and join a variety of independent black denominations.” Others have shown that many White church members of biracial antebellum churches applauded “the new segregated patterns of worship” during Reconstruction.2
What has not been told adequately are the stories of churches that remained integrated during Reconstruction and what this meant for the lives of White and African American congregants. In a somewhat surprising letter, given that many African American freed persons preferred having African American pastors, members of the old antebellum Zion Presbyterian Church asked Girardeau to come back and minister to them as during Reconstruction. Despite being offered the pastorate of Second Presbyterian Church in 1865, Girardeau agreed to the request and went on to become one of the leading advocates for integrated worship and improved ecclesiastical status for African Americans in the southern Presbyterian Church during Reconstruction. In 1869, he was the first and one of the only White southern Presbyterian to ordain African American elders.
This action was rooted in Girardeau’s antebellum work and an example of his unique views of the ecclesiastical relationship between African American and White members during Reconstruction. As Reconstruction progressed Page 132 →from state-controlled to a congressional-controlled program fully integrated institutions that afforded mutual care and support across racial lines became harder and harder to locate. As African Americans began participating in state, local, and municipal elections as voters and officeholders and participating in meaningful citizenship exercises, White South Carolinians expressed a desire to exert more political influence through racial violence. South Carolina’s state legislature had an African American majority, and to White southerners the church was one of the few spaces in which they still maintained control and authority. If once-enslaved African Americans were to experience more public and civic freedoms then White Charlestonians, as well as most White southerners sought segregated private institutions, especially the church.3 However from 1865 to 1874 African American freed persons and White southerners worshipped together and in a congregation in which John Lafayette Girardeau served as pastor.
Charleston was in utter ruin by the end of the Civil War. Girardeau served as chaplain of the Twenty-Third South Carolina Volunteers, served in a number of battles, and was remembered by soldiers for how he was able to bring comfort to the troops even in the midst of combat. An example of this soothing sensibility was evident in a letter from a camp on Sullivan’s Island that Girardeau penned on April 5, 1864. At the regimental meeting, he spoke on “the safety which even a sleeping Christ in the same boat guarantees the believer against the fiercest storm, even that which rages on the vast and shoreless ocean of eternity. Offered our evening sacrifice of prayer; pronounced the benediction and we separated . . . reminding us of the preciousness of mortal life, and suggesting, by contrast, the celestial ‘city that hath foundations.’”4 The same was true in the midst of battle.5
On April 6, 1865, Girardeau was captured at Sailor’s Creek and “although a non-combatant and pursuing strictly his spiritual duties was taken prisoner along with other chaplains, surgeons, and non-combatants,” was sent to Johnson’s Island prisoner-of-war camp to spend the remaining days of the war.6 In June 1865, the Union Army released Girardeau from prison. He sold his watch and was able to gather some support from friends in Philadelphia to make the long voyage home to South Carolina. He arrived in Charleston after spending time with his family in the Darlington District, South Carolina. It was not a time for jovial homecoming; he found Charleston in a state of turmoil and dismay.7 South Carolina was impoverished, and the economic status of the state was bleak. Girardeau was determined to carry on his work and was delighted when he came home and found a large number of members Page 133 →awaiting his return to the Zion Church pastorate.8 Girardeau wrote in an autobiographical account that
I was sent to prison, first at the old Capital, Washington, afterwards to Johnson’s Island, whence I was released in the latter part of June. Upon returning home to Darlington District, S.C. where my family was, I received several calls, but determined to accept an invitation by Presbyterian gentlemen in Charleston to preach to the scattered fragments of our churches there. At the close of the War the coloured membership of Zion Church was exactly 500. In January 1867, the church-building in Calhoun Street having, by military order, been recovered by the Corporation from the Northern Presbyterian Church, I collected those of the old coloured members who were willing to go with me, and began preaching to them regularly again, in connection with my pastoral labours for the white congregation in Glebe Street. Those who were re-enrolled were 116. We had great difficulties to contend with. The attendants upon our services were ridiculed and twitted with being still under the control of rebels. But the work went steadily on, and now the membership has risen to 460.9
Girardeau returned to Charleston to find the Zion building locked. The Zion Church structure on Calhoun Street was “held by the United States Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Land,” and the church operated “under the auspices of the Committee of Freedmen of the Old School General Assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church in December of 1866.”10 As Girardeau’s biographer and son-in-law noted, “Mr. Girardeau was absolutely shut out of his own church building, which had been taken possession of by a missionary of the Northern Presbyterian Church and held by the Freedmen’s Bureau, under the authority of the United States Government, and its occupancy positively denied to its legal owners and regularly installed pastor.”11 It is telling that while Girardeau saw this church as the property of the Southern Presbyterian Church and as Zion Presbyterian Church, under his pastorate the African American community of Charleston, as well as members of the Freedmen’s Bureau, considered this space as “theirs” and as belonging to the African American community of Charleston. Even though it was built, maintained, and largely supported by White Presbyterians the space was seen by freed persons and the freed persons’ bureau as belonging to African Americans. This is consistent with the antebellum views of Zion from among the enslaved African American membership.
Page 134 →The missionary in control of the Zion building was the Reverend Jonathan C. Gibbs from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He came to Charleston with the specific duty to oversee the church as well as to provide education for the enslaved African Americans of Charleston. “Reverend Gibbs occupied Zion Church and later brought suit under the Civil Rights Act to retain possession. He unsuccessfully contested the legal title to the property, arguing that since the church had been built for blacks it should belong to the Northern Presbyterians.” One historian argued that “the restoration of the church property to the Southern Presbyterians provided additional reasons for blacks to desert Zion for other congregations.”12 However a large number of freed persons remained committed to Girardeau despite the restoration. “A substantial congregation of blacks once again gathered at Zion under Girardeau’s preaching.”13 Girardeau was eager to continue his work no matter the new circumstances, and many of his flock were eager to have him. On December 23, 1866, Girardeau once again oversaw church services in the old Zion building. He preached that evening from 2 Corinthians.14
After the war, Girardeau’s “mind naturally turned to his beloved Zion Church in Charleston, and his heart yearned to be with that dear flock again.”15 Girardeau had returned to Charleston for a brief period in 1864 from service and found that many of the individuals who had been Zion members were anxiously awaiting his return to be their pastor. During Reconstruction northern missionaries, pastors, and freed persons were starting new churches for the recently freed African Americans, and many were fleeing their antebellum churches. Despite this mass exodus Girardeau continued to see some old members remain at Zion. One historian noted this phenomenon mentioning, “In contrast to the enthusiasm black Methodists and Baptists evinced for establishing separate churches, many of the [African American] Presbyterians were extremely reluctant to sever ties with their original churches.”16
An example of this continued relationship was found in a letter dated July 27, 1865, from Paul Trescot, one of the African American class leaders from the antebellum Zion Church. This correspondence displayed the desire of many in the congregation for Girardeau to return to Zion. Girardeau said of this letter, “One of the first invitations, in writing, which I received . . . to resume labor, was from this colored membership, entreating me to come back and preach to them as of old.”17 The letter contained the following passage:
Revd Sir & Pastor
We the undersign members of Zion Presbyterian Church embrace this opportunity, as one among the many good ones we have engaged in the Page 135 →past and in doing so you have our best wishish for your health & that of your loveing family hopeing all are engaging that blessing of good health and realizing that fulfillment of god words those that put their truss in him shall never want. The past relations we have engaged together fro many years as pastor and people are still in its bud in our every heart. Therefore we would well come you still as our pastor. To inform you that you past congregation will be the same in future and Till death provide past relations with you are and considered the same.18
Based on this letter the numbers of individuals retaining their membership at Zion and the fact that Girardeau carried on his labors at Zion into the mid-1870s, highlights the interconnected racial activity in churches during Reconstruction in South Carolina. These examples display the complexity of biracial religious activities in South Carolina during Reconstruction. While much work exists on political and economic institutions and interracial activities during Reconstruction in South Carolina few scholars have focused on interracial religious activity. These examples complicate the long-held interpretation that only widespread withdrawal of African Americans from White-led churches characterized the African American Christian experience during Reconstruction.
Many African American members remained at Zion and wanted Girardeau to be their minister once again. However Girardeau mentioned, “we had great difficulties to contend with. The attendants upon our services were ridiculed and twitted with [by other freedmen for] being still under the control of rebels. Many African American Presbyterians left Second Presbyterian Church, First Scot’s Presbyterian, Missions Presbyterian, and First Presbyterian churches due to the “white membership’s ‘deprecating spirit of exclusiveness’ that kept blacks from the ‘rights due to all church members in good standing regardless of majority or caste.’” These freed persons left the aforementioned churches and in 1867 and built their own Presbyterian church on George Street.19 Certainly the African American members at Zion would have been familiar with this Presbyterian exodus. However a continued relationship existed between Girardeau and his antebellum flock, and that same “deprecating spirit of exclusiveness” did not exist at Zion.
In 1866, while serving as pastor of Zion Church after the war Girardeau became the leading Southern Presbyterian advocate for integration of the Presbyterian Church. The General Assembly, which is the national governing body of the entire denomination, appointed him to chair a committee called the Committee on the Religious Instruction of the Freed People. Girardeau considered Page 136 →the topic and drew up a plan for how the integration of newly freed persons into positions of the church hierarchy would work. He felt strongly that the church had to offer ecclesiastical emancipation and to elevate African Americans from their minority status in the church. His desire was “to maintain the unity of the black and white congregations.”20 Girardeau had pastored a church in an antebellum context in which White visitors profited from engaging in services meant for enslaved African Americans. Girardeau understood something of the benefits of a multiethnic congregation, and “he was convinced that blacks and whites ought to remain together.”21
Girardeau desired to see both White and black members “continue in their spiritual relations as an integrated body.”22 Immediately following the Civil War factions within the Presbyterian Church of the United States (PCUS) began to debate what the ecclesiastical status of the newly freed African Americans would be. To resolve this matter the General Assembly of the PCUS called Girardeau to serve as chair on a committee “to consider the relations of the church to the freedmen and report on the whole subject.”23 He drafted a report to the General Assembly in 1866. Many of those at the assembly commended the report, and “the assembly adopted the committee’s resolution and ordered that Girardeau’s paper be published in the Southern Presbyterian Review.”24
In the report Girardeau explained his fundamental beliefs in the equality of the freed persons in the church, and he cited several biblical texts supporting these views. First, he pointed to the scriptural doctrine of the specific unity of the human race. In support of this doctrine he cited several biblical examples to prove that “all mankind sprang from one original pair, are involved in the consequences of Adam’s fall, and depend for their recovery solely upon the mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth.”25 The newly freed persons were equal in their humanity, created status, sinful estate, and need of a savior. This was a position held by many White church pastors and theologians of the time; it was an important foundational principle for Girardeau’s position on racial equality in the context of church membership.
Second, Girardeau claimed that all believers in Christ were united in goodwill, which distinctions of race, nationality, gender, culture, or civil status did not affect. He cited Galatians 3:28 in which Paul affirmed that there is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile in Christ, dispelling any notion of a racial priority in salvation or in church status. For Girardeau with regard to one’s ecclesiastical status and membership in the church, Christ had wiped away all barriers of race, ethnicity, or nationality, and Christians had always been Page 137 →those who received his promise by faith alone. Girardeau’s opinions can be contrasted with those of Robert Lewis Dabney, who in his book A Defense of Virginia and later in the Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes, referred to African Americans as a “subservient race; made to follow, and not to lead; that his temperament, idiosyncrasy and social relation make him untrustworthy.”26 Girardeau’s affirmation of the spiritual equality of all regardless of race pushed his position toward spiritual and ecclesiastical equality.
Third, Girardeau suggested that the new civil climate of Reconstruction, in light of the Thirteenth Amendment, demanded a renewed consideration of African Americans’ status in the church. In accordance with the emancipation of the enslaved Christians were now under civil obligation to grant equality to formerly enslaved African Americans. As Girardeau stated, “The ecclesiastical disabilities which attached to them, growing out of the state of slavery, are no longer in existence. It must be admitted that, technically speaking, their minority in the church must be removed.”27 He believed that southern Presbyterians could no longer use the “slave argument” to keep freed persons from serving as equals in the church. For Girardeau it was time for full ecclesiastical equality, which meant granting greater privileges and powers to the African Americans in the church because of their new civil status as citizens in the United States.
Fourth and finally Girardeau wrestled with the social differences of the two races. Pulling back from the earlier thrust of his report, Girardeau maintained that social distinctions do exist between White and Black and that these will most likely not change. He stated they “naturally spring from the memory of relations recently destroyed, and destroyed in opposition to the views and desires of the white people of the south.”28 Girardeau understood that decades of White southerners seeing African Americans as enslaved would create in their minds a view that African Americans were inferior people. It is also likely that Girardeau himself believed this and was hesitant to fully grant that new freed persons would be qualified to teach and preach. Little would he know that the memory of these “relations” would not be forgotten even into the twenty-first century as southern Presbyterians continued to contend that African Americans could not attend and become members of White churches. Girardeau understood that African Americans would soon have “a desire for social equality,” which he argued, “whites will not be willing to concede.”29 While Girardeau was willing to concede ecclesiastical and spiritual equality he could not yet envision other Whites extending social equality outside of the church and even the right to preach or lead as a senior pastor over White congregants within it.
Page 138 →For Girardeau even the way toward ecclesiastical equality would be slowed by present difficulties. He believed that newly freed African Americans were not ready in their educational preparation to serve as ministers in the Presbyterian Church. Three times in his report he observed “the freedmen have not men who would be capable of sustaining the weighty responsibilities and discharging the difficult duties of spiritual teachers”; that “the colored people have not, at present, the men who are capable of adequately discharging the difficult and responsible functions of ministers of the gospel”; and they are “ecclesiastically speaking, but children still in the condition of growth, as the wisest of them admit.”30 For Girardeau ecclesiastical equality for African Americans depended on spiritual growth, adequate seminary education, and ministerial training. It is clear from Girardeau’s words as well as the general context of his report that his decision to deny equal ecclesiastical status to potential leadership among the freed persons was based on a paternalistic framework and denied opportunities for freed persons to preach. Indeed many had already been preaching at the antebellum church as “exhorters.” It seems as if Girardeau was using a lack of formal ministerial training to make the argument that African American freed persons were not ready for pastoral leadership positions. This is likely because Girardeau knew it would take time for White congregants to accept the authoritative role of an African American pastor over a White member.31
The Presbyterian Church’s ordination standards, which were extremely high for ministers and pastors regardless of race, supported Girardeau’s line of reasoning. To become a minister in the Presbyterian Church, one would need to first display a desire for ministry and then receive a call from leaders in the church who noticed these gifts. Next the candidate would have to gain some knowledge of language (usually Greek and Hebrew) as well as biblical and theological expertise through extensive seminary training. Finally the candidate would be tested with a series of written and oral examinations under the care of his presbytery and pass them competently. Being a traditional Presbyterian Girardeau likely wanted candidates to go through this process before he acknowledged them as candidates for ecclesiastical leadership. Apparently Girardeau did not see any African Americans in his congregation ready to take on this formal educational evaluation. However enslaved African Americans were never given an equitable opportunity for a seminary education in South Carolina before the Civil War. Even their educational opportunities in slave mission churches were limited to a second-class curriculum such as catechisms specifically designed for the enslaved and Bible classes where students were not even allowed to read but had to commit texts to memory.
Page 139 →To provide for their training and eventual equality Girardeau proposed that a “missionary congregation of colored people with the power of electing their own deacons would be a possibility for the worship of new freedmen. Under this system the election of deacons would be a step in the maturing process for the freedman and if the maturation process went as planned then there would be the possibility for the possession of the ruling eldership.”32 Girardeau also provided for theological education in his report. He recognized those in the African American community who possessed the spiritual gifts to become leaders and pastors in the church, but those individuals would need financial support and mentoring. Girardeau was asserting there were no African Americans who could be considered candidates for leadership as none had attained the proper qualifications. The church would have to provide leadership training, financial support, and encouragement for African Americans to hold their rightful place as pastors.
Girardeau argued publicly for the ecclesiastical equality of freed persons, and he desired to retain a church in which both White and Black worshipped together. He realized that these freed persons were “the poor in our communities, and we are only their neighbors, when, in accordance with the great principle inculcated by our Savior, we go to their assistance in their need.”33 He was also interested in preserving a close relationship between the two races in the church organization and was willing to grant, “It is impossible to deny them the greatest extension of their rights.”34 Girardeau sought ecclesiastical integration of the two races at a time and place in which many Whites sought complete separation from freed persons. Indeed the church was one of the few spaces during Reconstruction in South Carolina in which Whites and former enslavers still exerted some measure of spiritual authority and control over African American life. To yield this authority to African American leadership would have been unlikely.
It is noteworthy that while many White southerners were fighting for strict racial control of every single southern institution during the later years of Reconstruction, from government positions to economic opportunities, Girardeau was advancing integration in one of the last places that southern Whites still maintained a measure of control: the church. The church was one of the last strongholds for southern Whites to maintain antebellum spiritual roles, and it was one of the few places in which federal law could not intervene and force the church to grant ecclesiastical equality. Therefore many White southerners during Reconstruction used the church as a space to reenforce antebellum racial stratifications. However, Girardeau was advocating integration, Page 140 →education of freed persons with a gradual move toward leadership, and equality in ecclesiastical status. His forward-thinking proposals could not overcome many outright racist sentiments among his contemporaries.
In response to Girardeau’s report, the PCUS General Assembly made several resolutions. Most of the responses were positive and seemingly agreed with much of what Girardeau recommended. One of the resolutions included “that it is highly inexpedient that there should be an ecclesiastical separation of the white and colored races.”35 Others provided for communities to set up educational and mission churches for the poor freed persons in their communities. Whatever good came from these resolutions toward the uniting of the two races would be challenged by Robert Lewis Dabney’s separatist ideologies rooted in racism, White supremacy, and his ability to shape public opinion toward the fear of racial amalgamation in the church.
Historian and theologian Sean Lucas described Dabney as “outraged and desperate” in his 1867 response to Girardeau’s recommendations. Dabney penned, “I knew that this racial amalgamation would ruin our church. I felt like it was a moment of life and death for the church. I resolved, therefore, to fight like a man striking for life or death, to drop every restraint, and to give full swing to every force of argument, emotion, will, and utterance” (against the idea of ecclesiastical equality).36 Like Dabney many White southerners were not yet ready to grasp notions of ecclesiastical equality that Girardeau argued for in 1866, and early thoughts on Girardeau’s report were positive. However in 1867, “outraged and desperate” Robert Lewis Dabney, pastor, theologian, and former Confederate chaplain provided a glimpse into the possibility of having ecclesiastical equality in the church for the newly freed African Americans.
Robert Lewis Dabney was born on March 5, 1820, in Louisa County, Virginia. Early in Dabney’s life he developed a deep passion for the South and especially for his native Virginia. Dabney’s love for the South and his limitless devotion to its ideals of gentility, paternalism, and piety became an influence throughout his life. This devotion shaped his biblical understanding in the defense of enslavement and for the subjugation of the African American race. Lucas, the most recent Dabney biographer, suggested that, “while Dabney held that his belief in hierarchy, patriarchy, and household relations was drawn from Scripture, his anti-egalitarianism was deeply influenced by his un-biblical antipathy toward African Americans.”37 Living in the very rural county of Louisa, Dabney was exposed to a limited number of African Americans compared with the southerners in the Lowcountry areas of tidewater Virginia or South Carolina. Southerners like Girardeau who grew up on the outskirts of Page 141 →a more urban city like Charleston, would have known many enslaved African American males, their wives, and children, and would have engaged with them regularly. Dabney’s somewhat limited engagements with those of different ethnicities was a coercive force that served to shape his racial tendencies.
At the heart of Dabney’s background perhaps is the Virginian as well as southern commitments to honor and masculinity. In antebellum southern culture honor was gained by social position maintained by one’s actions and defended violently either in war or in a duel.38 Dabney’s commitment to honor most likely started to develop early in his life. When he was thirteen his father passed away, and he was left to manage his mother’s household, farm, and enslaved African Americans. Later at the Hampden Sydney College, the University of Virginia, and Union Theological Seminary Dabney saw his academic studies as a way of maintaining his family name and thus securing his honor. The root presupposition of southern gentility was that not everyone in society could be honorable. Dabney displayed a sense of this ideology when he stated that “the master slave relationship, while not an inherent positive good to either party, was the best possible social relation between white and black Americans.”39 There were those in southern society who were unable to attain honor due to their subjugated status. For Dabney this included African Americans, as well as poor Whites whom he saw as under his paternalistic care. Lucas insightfully noted that “this code of honor was pictured best in the Southerners’ favorite novel, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. During battle, Ivanhoe was injured and was not able to participate in the battle. By being ‘passive as a priest, or a woman,’ while others were ‘acting deeds of honor,’ Ivanhoe felt especially dishonorable.”40 This southern system of honor and masculinity would certainly have been formative to Dabney’s views of the status of African Americans, who were not honorable because they were enslaved.
Dabney’s theological commitments shaped his worldview as well. Later in his life when Virginia was engaged in the Civil War In 1867, Dabney wrote his famous book, A Defense of Virginia. In this book Dabney attempted to provide biblical, social, and economic arguments for enslavement. While Dabney provided biblical bases for his arguments his work was filled with his hatred of the rationalistic abolitionists, the northern hordes who sought to “Yankee-ize” the biblical southerners, and the barbaric and pagan African race who did not deserve equality.41 While many of Dabney’s arguments for enslavement referenced biblical passages many of his references were either taken out of context or were chosen with the purpose of propagating his own agenda concerning enslavement and a racial hierarchy. Often it is hard to discern the areas Page 142 →in A Defense of Virginia in which he was trying to be faithful to the text and the areas that he was manipulating biblical passages for the protection of a southern economic system, an honor culture of the South, and the “good of the Lost Cause.” Eugene Genovese, on the topic of segregation, mentioned this cultural pervasiveness into the lives of many southern divines: “Nothing is more disheartening than to see such firmly orthodox Christians as Dabney, who stood all of his life on sola scriptura and turned to the Bible for guidance on every subject, plunge into arguments from sheer prejudice that hardly pretended to be scripturally grounded.”42
After Reconstruction, Dabney became embittered both by the South’s loss and the pervasiveness of northern culture into the South. He eventually lost his teaching position at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia and moved to Texas where he accepted the chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin. This move would have been seen as somewhat of an “exile” for the aging theologian who was so in love with his native Virginia. He threatened many times in letters to his friends (specifically Moses Hoge) to emigrate to Brazil where he claimed that a new South could be created, one that was not influenced by “Yankee-ized” culture and in which southern gentility could be preserved. While he never emigrated to Brazil Dabney sought to maintain a sense of “sectionalism in the reunited country. It was primarily in the Presbyterian Church, not in monuments or Confederate Day speeches that Dabney sought to preserve southern identity.”43 Dabney saw the PCUS as the last bastion of maintaining southern culture, and so he sought to keep the church sectional at all costs. It is in this time of Dabney’s life that we begin to see him “outraged and desperate” at the prospect of having ecclesiastical equality with African Americans.
As historian H. Shelton Smith observed, “The old school Calvinist argued, to the very end of his life, that the Negro was an inferior member of the human race whom God appointed to play a subservient role in a white-ruled church and state.”44 For Dabney, African American ecclesiastical equality meant that the destruction of White civilization was imminent. Dabney and other White southerners feared that along with ecclesiastical equality would come social, political, and inevitable racial amalgamation or racial mixing. As a result, Dabney and many other southern Presbyterian clergy fought hard against any move toward equality in any ecclesiastical sphere for African Americans. It is not too much to claim that this “century of segregation” from the early 1860s to the mid-1960s and into the twenty-first century is the result of Dabney’s and others’ unbiblical justifications for race-based enslavement and Page 143 →racial segregation. It was these same ideas and references that theologically like-minded southerners used for decades to continue racial separatism in the church. It is only recently that those in southern Presbyterian traditions have begun to reevaluate what the scriptures teach concerning enslavement and race and have come to realize the implications of adhering to the arguments of nineteenth-century southern theologians on these topics.
The PCUS General Assembly had urged the lower church courts to consider Girardeau’s report on the ecclesiastical relationship between the church and freed persons. Accordingly the synod of Virginia took the matter up at its 1867 meeting. At one point during the meeting “it so happened that Dabney was temporarily absent from the church when the measure was adopted, and when he returned and discovered what had taken place he was furious. After his friends managed to secure a reconsideration of the overture, he attacked it with every forensic weapon at his command.”45 The result of those forensic weapons was the speech later published as “The Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes.” Dabney himself stated that there had “broken out among many a sort of morbid craving to ordain negroes; to get their hands on their heads,” which he later claimed stemmed from a “‘moral and mental malaria,’ a pernicious disease that had infected a large portion of mankind.”46 In his response to Girardeau’s report and the synod’s action Dabney offered several arguments why the church could not “grant” ecclesiastical equality to African Americans freed persons.
First, Dabney held that the time to extend equality was not the present. He believed that this question could not be decided with the hearts of men so strained by “unusual passions” still lingering from the Civil War. During Reconstruction, the former enslaving population of the South was struggling to retain some sort of power within its society, which had been recently conquered. It was the first time many Whites had seen African Americans living and working around them freely. Further some like Reverend Gibbs were coming from the North and were positioning newly freed African Americans in political offices and ministerial positions. In the midst of these actions Dabney was steadfast in his resolve to maintain southern White dominance: “When I see [the freedmen] almost universally banded to make themselves the eager tools of the remorseless enemies of my country, to assail my vital rights, and to threaten the very existence of civil society and the church at once,” Dabney declared, “I must beg leave to think the time rather mal apropos for demanding of me an expression of particular affection.”47
Second, Dabney believed that the Memphis Assembly’s decision was right in principle but wrong in its details concerning principles. Dabney believed Page 144 →that African Americans were equals spiritually but he did not believe that the church should sponsor educational ministries to help them secure ecclesiastical equality. He agreed that ordination should be granted to those who were called by God and qualified for the work, but he noted that Blacks were automatically disqualified to minister to Whites saying: “But in which meaning is it to be taken? Does it imply that we may properly decide that the evidence of God’s call and qualification is fatally defective, where an insuperable difference of race, made by God and not by man, and of the character and social condition, makes it plainly impossible for a black man to teach and rule white Christians to edification?”48 This argument stated that the call and qualifications of ministry could come to Blacks but only in the context of an all-Black church. However this same call and qualification could not be granted were Blacks to shepherd and lead a White congregation.
The third reason that Dabney opposed freed persons’ ecclesiastical equality was that he saw it as impractical. He argued based on his assumption that the only “effect that it can have will be to agitate, and so to injure our existing churches.”49 Dabney believed that no African American could ever meet the standard of character, prudence, and morality that the Presbyterian standards required to minister to Whites.50 Fourth, something that undoubtedly served to frighten his fellow ministers was the claim that ecclesiastical equality would lead to racial amalgamation (or the mixing of the Black and White races), which according to Dabney was nothing less than “the work of the devil.”51 If Dabney could not win the day based on his biblical and practical arguments he would resort to fear tactics to gain the desired result. Dabney even went so far as to claim that the blood of persons like George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas J. Jackson would be corrupted with such amalgamation. “Yes, sir, these tyrants know that if they can mix the race of Washington and Lee and Jackson with this base herd which they brought from the fens of Africa,” then “the adulterous current will never again swell a Virginian’s heart with a throb noble enough to make a despot tremble.”52
Dabney dealt briefly with the scriptural arguments that Girardeau and others put forth as reasons for freed persons to have ecclesiastical equality. In response to Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” Dabney responded that while the blessings of redemption were offered to all races, it does not mean that the responsibilities of church office are available to all believers, irrespective of class or race. Dabney cited the Old Testament qualifications of the priests of the Israelites being limited specifically to the tribe of Levi. What Dabney failed to exegete however was that while Page 145 →God may have chosen a certain people (the Israelites) to be his own in the Old Testament, he did not single out an “entire race of people to be specifically degraded and dishonorable. According to Paul, all humanity is degraded by the virtue of sin and rebellion against God and all need redemption through Jesus Christ.”53 Dabney revealed in his scriptural justification the ecclesiastical inequality of African Americans, a racial prejudice rather than sound biblical exegesis. Dabney’s belief in the inherent inequality of the African American race and his agenda to maintain a White-governed church drove his approach to the biblical text. As Lucas well stated, “Dabney’s racial orthodoxy was not biblical orthodoxy. Far from proving his case that nonwhites were biblically banned from holding church office, Dabney revealed his intense racial prejudice.”54
Fifth and finally, Dabney claimed that the early church refused to ordain enslaved persons even though they were freely admitted into the church.55 What Dabney failed to understand however was that early church leaders were not necessarily White; neither were enslaved persons in Roman society always Africans. Slavery in the Greco-Roman culture of the early church differed greatly from mid-nineteenth-century southern American enslavement. Mostly it differed because the institution of enslavement in the United States chose a particular race of people (sub-Saharan Africans) as the only race that could be stolen, bought, sold, and brought into plantations in the Western Hemisphere. Roman enslavement as it existed in the New Testament was not race based, and there was not one particular race chosen above others as somehow more desirable to be enslaved. Household enslaved persons such as Onesimus (a slave for whom the Apostle Paul wrote a letter to Philemon) had a different status in Roman society than did a slave who worked in the mines or in the fields. Members of Roman society occasionally sold themselves into enslavement (under a contract agreed upon by both enslaved person and patron) to a wealthier patron in hopes of gaining social advancement through the care and financial support of the patron. Once these household enslaved persons were granted freedom by their patrons after the agreed-upon time economic as well as social advancement in Roman society was available. There was no such comparison that could made in the American South. If you were African American in the U.S. South, enslavement was for life and the life of your offspring.
Likewise Dabney’s racial antipathy would not have been shared by the early church. Dabney made a mistake in his logic by comparing his own situation and context of American enslavement to that of the early church under the Roman Empire. There is no biblical or historical evidence of racial distinctions being made as to preventing the appointments of elders or deacons in the Page 146 →first-century church. Rather when the first deacons were chosen Jewish men selected Greek men to care for the needs of Greek widows. Furthermore it was common among the first-century church leaders to appoint Gentiles and Jews alike to various positions of deacon or elder. Gentiles in the church came from a variety of racial backgrounds including peoples from the continents of Africa, Asia Minor, western Asia, and Italy. This is evidenced in Titus when Paul tells him to “appoint elders in every town as I directed you.” This is even the case on the island of Crete, upon which Paul is called to labor among and train church leadership in a place full of “degraded and dishonorable peoples.”56
Dabney had two possible solutions to the “problem” of ecclesiastical equality for African Americans. One was for African Americans to remain in the church with the same status that they had before the war: as second-class enslaved members. The other was that they should separate and form a Black Presbyterian Church, ecclesiastically independent from the White church, while continuing to maintain bonds of friendship. There were the only two ways Dabney was willing to extend ministerial and ecclesiastical equality.57 Eventually the PCUS would try Dabney’s second solution and opt for segregation or what was called “organic separation,” forming the Afro-American Presbyterian Church in 1874.
Providing ecclesiastical leadership toward what would later be adopted by the logic of Jim Crow Dabney proposed and the church acceded to segregation and the doctrine of a “separate but equal” church. Those who were there and heard Dabney’s speech describe the effects of it as “powerful: ‘His audience was held in agony of suppressed emotion.’”58 One of the audience members noted that “when he finished, we felt as men feel when a tornado has just swept by them. We drew a long breath to relieve the lungs.”59 The synod voted overwhelmingly to request the General Assembly to overturn their previous decision, and the topic of licensing and ordaining men to gospel ministry was placed in the hands of the presbyteries. The 1867 General Assembly rescinded its resolution from the previous year, and Dabney’s speech served as the turning point against racial ecclesiastical equality in the Southern Presbyterian Church.60
Despite Dabney’s victory in the church courts Girardeau continued to serve as pastor of Zion Church and sought the enhanced ecclesiastical status of African American members during and after Reconstruction. One glowing remembrance of this postbellum work described, “It was like a first love with him to serve these children of Africa, and with all the burdens and the attractions and the encouragements of a large and influential white city congregation to Page 147 →minister unto, his heart ever yearned for the salvation of the negro and his development into efficient Christian service.”61 Many African American congregants expressed a recognition of Girardeau’s work. His son-in-law recorded a story of two freed persons after the Civil War. “One of his (Girardeau’s) negro members asked another negro to go with him to the church. The latter, refusing on the ground that the church had a white preacher, received this prompt reply from Dr. Girardeau’s friend, ‘Yes, he face is white, but he heart is black.’”62
On December 23, 1866, Girardeau recommenced services at Zion Presbyterian. “Once the air began to clear in Charleston, Girardeau intended to resume his ministry with the African Americans of Charleston. Slave or free, they were the object of his affection, and that had not been changed by the war.”63 In April 1866, the presbytery ordered the consolidation of the Glebe Street Church with Zion. The formal installation service took place on December 29, 1867. This consolidation included both African American as well as White members. Zion retained “the offices of both congregations in the united church, including the pastor, and holding the name Zion Church, the regular worship being conducted on the building on Glebe Street. And thus Mr. Girardeau entered upon his memorable pastorate in Charleston after the war.”64
Zion expanded its membership after the war, and the annual reports show a steady growth of new members. This growth was mostly a result of the continuance of sabbath schools, of which Girardeau was a strong advocate. In a letter to Reverend Thomas H. Law Girardeau discussed this model of sabbath education extensively. He commented, “I have never seen any results equal to those which are secured by this method,” which was entitled “A Key to the Shorter Catechism, etc.”65 He went on, “I am delighted with it. And this I say from constant observation, for I attend the Sabbath school regularly and take charge of the main question and the analytical exercise when the school is brought together en masse.” Girardeau believed in education for his newly freed congregants, and he claimed that “it is a glorious privilege and a grand opportunity. I regard the exercise as one of the most promising in the circle of pastoral labors. We are trying to train the scholars as Presbyterian Christians.” Education was a top priority to Girardeau, and he chose not to separate his classes along racial lines. Both Whites and African Americans attended and the educational experiences at Zion through Girardeau prompted some congregants to go to seminary and into the ministry.66
In 1867, more African American members determined they wanted to be a part of Zion with Girardeau as their pastor. As one witness remembered many “were ready to come back to their old church and remained loyal to their former Page 148 →faithful and devoted pastor, and sometimes large congregations attended the services.”67 On March 25, 1867, the (White) session of the church nominated seven (African American) individuals to be superintendents over the new congregation.68 Many were the same men who had served as class leaders and “watchmen” in the old Zion before the Civil War. Between Old Zion and Zion Glebe Street there were 440 African American members not including 60 new members added in 1868. By March 1869, the total congregation numbered 561.69
On Tuesday, July 27, 1869, “the Session of Zion Presbyterian Church formed the Zion Presbyterian Church (Colored), Calhoun Street. Indeed, the black membership constituted more than one-half the total membership of Girardeau’s flock in 1869.” Later that year Girardeau’s work toward ecclesiastical equality of the newly freed persons came to fulfillment. W. F. Robertson recorded that “upon recommendation of the Session, the following African-American men were nominated to serve in the office of Ruling Elder–Paul Trescot, William Price, Jacky Morrison, Samuel Robinson, William Spencer, and John Warren.”70 As a result Girardeau became the first White member of the Southern Presbyterian Church to ordain African Americans to the position of ruling elder, the highest position in the local Presbyterian Church Session.71
In 1871, Girardeau, hindered by throat problems, was doubtful whether he should continue to work at Zion. Later that summer he drafted a letter of resignation to both his congregations. He “felt constrained, in the face of the vigorous opposition of the Session and the earnest remonstrance of the people, to tender his resignation, which he pressed so urgently that the pastoral relation was actually dissolved by the Presbytery.” However when Girardeau actually came to the congregation to give them his farewell address, “the people, and their earnest desire that he should remain as their pastor had taken such shape that he decided at once not to leave them.” “The congregation proceeded to call him again, and the Presbytery, after a season of rest on his part, reinstated him pastor without his having separated from his cherished and devoted flock.”72 This act demonstrated that by the 1870s African American congregants still desired to retain Girardeau as their pastor. After taking an extended leave Girardeau returned to Zion but with increasing problems of racial separatism in the denomination and escalating racial tensions in South Carolina because of Reconstruction his work among the African American community in Charleston was tenuous.
John Boles once wrote, “he kinship between the white and black churches of today is readily apparent, and it points back to a time more than a century Page 149 →ago when the religious culture of the South was fundamentally biracial.”73 Girardeau’s postbellum work has had a lasting impact on the Charleston African American community. While many of Girardeau’s contemporaries fought integration, African American ecclesiastical leadership, and the rights of the newly freed persons after the Civil War, Girardeau worked for ecclesiastical reform in a resistant and embittered White South. This work is significant in several ways to the modern landscape. For instance in the wake of the Emmanuel AME massacre in Charleston in 2015, there were many relationships between historic White churches and historic Black churches that had been in existence for almost two centuries. If you spoke to both White and African American pastors and church members on the ground in Charleston, South Carolina, during those terrible days in 2015, the biracial relationships bubbled up from previous kinship, biracial fellowship, and stop-and-start racial reconciliation efforts ongoing in Charleston throughout the late twentieth century. One member of Mount Zion AME on Glebe Street has even gone so far as to say that the affection of the AME church on Glebe Street for its White Presbyterian friends in town was still very strong and much had to do with Girardeau’s legacy. In 2017, Jemar Tisby and I hosted a racial pilgrimage in Charleston for a large campus ministry organization, and one of the evenings centered around the racial reconciliation efforts happening between Mount Zion AME on Glebe Street and Grace Church Cathedral Episcopalian Church next door. Girardeau’s legacy and the memory of biracial efforts on Glebe Street at Zion were the glue around which much of the evening’s discussion centered. In 2020, and again in 2025, DeSean Dyson and I would lead similar pilgrimages for the organizations CRU and Telos. Charleston has become a city for racial healing pilgrimages and this research plays a pivotal role in that work.
In 1873, Girardeau penned that “the work of the Presbyterian church among blacks was reported as ‘languishing,’ and the status of those already within the fold of the Southern Presbyterian church had become increasingly problematic.” Further, “the South Carolina Synod of that year hotly debated the issue of effecting an ecclesiastical separation from the blacks and the establishment of an Independent African Presbyterian Church.” In 1873, the Synod of South Carolina had overtured the 1869 decision adopted by the General Assembly to have separate congregations for African Americans. In April 1873, the resignation “by the Rev. Peter Gowan” from his “connection with the Calhoun Street Coloured Presbyterian Church” further complicated the situation in Charleston, and it again “devolved upon the Rev. John L. Girardeau to take charge of Page 150 →the Congregation.” From 1873 to 1874, Girardeau continued to be the pastor of the church and conducted the session meetings.74
In 1874, Benjamin M. Palmer, among other Southern Presbyterian leaders at the Columbus, Mississippi, General Assembly, called for the organic separation of African Americans from White Presbyterian churches. Girardeau was the lone voice in the southern Presbyterian Church arguing for continued integration. Girardeau’s effort to retain an integrated church ultimately failed, and “with the establishment of the African Presbyterian Church, Girardeau’s cause for an integrated church was lost.”75 Further “when Girardeau convened the black members of Zion and explained that they might withdraw from the church, he found that while the elderly members vigorously opposed the idea of separation,” but “Young Africa, which was in the majority, favored it.”76
Girardeau later wrote about this separation and his stance: “I advised the congregation to adopt it, notwithstanding the fact that my judgment had been opposed to it as a threatening ultimate danger to the spiritual interests of the coloured people. But the drift of events now lies in the direction of organic separation, and it was idle for me to stand alone.” Girardeau was considerably troubled by both the General Assembly’s as well as the Presbyterian Church’s adoption of the plan. He wrote, “There was a want of interest in the work, whether rightly or not, I undertake not to judge. I cannot feel that I am responsible for the severance of my pastoral relation to the colored people.” Displaying the sentiments for Girardeau members of the congregation responded, “when I stated to them that the effect of their adoption of the Assembly’s recommendation would necessarily be to sunder my pastoral relations to them, a great part of the Congregation broke forth into loud wails and cries. I have never witnessed such a scene.” Girardeau described the “greater portion of the congregation suddenly bowed their heads to their knees and sobbed and wailed aloud. The great majority of the women opposed the change, the great majority of the men adopted it.”77
One can only speculate why women opposed the change, while most of the men adopted it. The notes hint that most of the men adopting it were younger. Perhaps this had something to do with a realization that an autonomous African American–led congregation was preferred, given recent civic freedoms and the postwar climate, which was growing increasingly more hostile toward African Americans. Young men already realized that the society was segregating, and many Whites were simply trying to impose old power structures onto new social and civic climates. It is possible that they saw Girardeau as representative Page 151 →of the old power structure. However youthful ambition and resolve might not have been the predominant position. Women and some older men in the congregation might have had their own ideas of what they were gaining and losing.
Women and older men were certainly aware of antebellum power structures as well as postbellum attempts at reasserting those old power dynamics. While they were more vulnerable than their younger counterparts, older men and women could have provoked action on this issue with regard to considering their own protection. Sobbing and wailing could have been as much about losing an advocate and protector as much as losing a pastor. It is possible that these individuals grew accustomed to using Girardeau’s privilege as a shield protecting them from an increasingly violent White society. Girardeau sometimes functioned as an antebellum symbol of protection, provision, and safety. Perhaps this group of African Americans in Charleston was hesitant to sever those ties knowing that Girardeau’s advocacy would continue to be important in its community. Perhaps wanting to continue under his leadership was the wiser and more politically pragmatic position. Regardless the congregation split over the decision, which displayed complexity within Zion Church about the relationship between Girardeau and the African American membership in 1874.
The General Assembly decided for something called “organic separation” along racial lines and on July 5, 1874, “after much discussion the members unanimously voted their agreement ‘to the severance, in good feeling, of our organic relations to said church, with a view to the formation of a separate Coloured Presbyterian Church with its Presbyteries, Synods, etc.’”78 Girardeau later wrote, “That was how the breach occurred. The colored people voted for it, and I gave them the road.”79 However Girardeau’s task was not yet over. In a heartrending letter written to the Reverend J. B. Mack on July 29, 1874, Girardeau penned, “Dear Brother Joe . . . Last night the mystic tie which has so long bound me to the coloured people in this city was formally severed. The Calhoun St. Congregation adopted the Assembly’s recommendation for organic separation. I am to correspond with parties as to securing a coloured minister for them. There is Robert Carter in Savannah—there is the man licensed as an Evangelist by Presb. of Memphis.” Girardeau also thought of a man named Gee but later said that “Gee reads his sermons and his health is not strong.” The sadness with which Girardeau wrote regarding the separation from Zion Calhoun Street displayed a perspective of the former slave missionary that further complicates our understanding of slave missions as well as Page 152 →post–Civil War race relations and ongoing interracial worship during Reconstruction. Girardeau’s fight for a racially harmonious, ecclesiastically equal, and integrated worship service was now lost.80
Overwhelming denominational pressures for racial separatism combined with the African American male and “Young Africa’s” exodus brought Girardeau’s postbellum work with the African American population of Charleston to a close in 1874. Girardeau eventually accepted James H. Thornwell’s position teaching Didactic and Polemic Theology at Columbia Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. His farewell letter dated December 20, 1875, expressed the degree of sadness at his resignation of working and laboring with African Americans of the South Carolina Lowcountry: “Your affectionate and generous conduct towards me has increased my obligations to you, and bound my heart to you more closely than ever. I am profoundly grateful to you for all of your kindness; I love you tenderly and deeply; and only a conviction of duty impels me to take this painful step.”81
In 1878, over 350 of Girardeau’s African American members left Zion. He later remarked, “It was in past days, my privilege to enjoy with those courteous and noble gentlemen. They were my warm friends, and I hope, through grace, to meet them when not long hence it shall be my turn to go.”82 By 1879, Zion Presbyterian Church on Calhoun Street affiliated with the Atlantic Presbytery of the Northern Presbyterian Church along with Hopewell, Aimwell, and Salem Churches.83 Working for ecclesiastical reform for African Americans within the PCUS was not the only legacy of Girardeau’s postbellum work. Girardeau’s legacy of working toward the education of African American Presbyterian communities in Charleston lasted well into the twenty-first century.84
The legacy of Girardeau’s antebellum slave missionary work combined with his postbellum pastorate of newly freed African Americans left an imprint on the history of African Americans in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. During Reconstruction Zion would house the first school for African Americans in Charleston. Zion was also the first site for political discourse among African American political candidates. Finally the African American leadership that Girardeau helped to establish in the 1850s and later ordained in 1869, went on to serve as a crucial foundation for later guidance in the Presbyterian Church’s Atlantic Presbytery as well as the larger African American community in Charleston.
In 1878, “Zion became a USA church. The first colored minister—listed in Atlantic Presbytery pastured Zion–Rev. Wm. C. Smith.”85 It was no coincidence that the first ordained African American pastor/reverend in the entire Page 153 →Atlantic Presbytery came from the same church that Girardeau helped establish. Perhaps another reason for much activity at Zion after the war was the sheer size of the building, which could seat almost three thousand people. The building’s size made it a prominent gathering spot, which met logistic as well as communal needs. Both the familiarities with Zion and the building itself were direct results of the work of Adger and Girardeau who helped create the building and the mission. Zion was not only the center for African American activity in Charleston; it was also the location of the first freed persons’ school.
Others around the country knew of Girardeau’s work as well. In 1865, Daniel Payne visited Charleston as bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in hopes of reestablishing a church there that would later be called Emmanuel. The first place at which he preached was at Zion Presbyterian Church. Erskine Clarke wrote that “it was not by accident that Payne preached on his first Sunday morning in the Zion Presbyterian Church. Zion had become identified in the years immediately before the war as a center of the black community in Charleston. It would remain so during the years immediately after the war.”86 The African American community was certainly familiar with Zion and connected it as a place that was “for” them. It would have been natural for Payne to preach at Zion. Indeed it was the building built for African Americans, where they were at the center of the worship service. It was no coincidence that after the Civil War Zion became a central meeting ground for the African American community religiously, politically, and educationally.
As historian Bernard Powers argued, “Black churches were instrumental in promoting freedmen’s education. When one representative of the A.M.A arrived at Plymouth Church, he found a school already organized and operated by a black superintendent and black teachers”87 Powers was referring to one of the first schools established for freed persons in Charleston. Teachers held school in Zion Church’s basement starting in 1865, with 199 boys and 225 girls.88 The school, founded by Reverend Johnathan C. Gibbs, was originally the Zion School and then the Siloam Church but changed its name to Wallingford Academy “after a Pittsburgh donor.”89 The school was approved by the state of South Carolina, “recognized by the board of education as highly rated,” and went from grades one through eight.90
Eventually the school moved to Wallingford Presbyterian Church on Meeting Street, but it continued to grow and produced a number of African American scholars throughout Reconstruction. By 1868, the school had about 532 students.91 The curriculum included courses in reading, writing, arithmetic, English literature, history, natural philosophy, physiology, and algebra. By the Page 154 →1880s the enrollment had grown to well over 600 students, and “Wallingford would play for more than sixty years an important role in the education of Charleston’s black community.”92 In 1968, the Reverend R. R. Woods of Wallingford Church said that “the church was organized from Zion Presbyterian Church on March 3, 1867,” and that “the Presbyterian Church (Northern) basically had in mind educating the Negro. The white missionaries came to teach and preach.”93 While there was not a focus on education because there was not a formal school under Girardeau, Woods did not separate the work. It would have been very easy to simply leave out the work of Girardeau and the White missionaries, but it was included. What was happening under the teaching and preaching of the antebellum missionaries and postbellum pastors while it was not formal undergirded and provided a space for the more formal postbellum education of freed persons. Further Wood’s comment displayed the interconnectedness of these two periods and how the post–Civil War experience for both African Americans and Whites was directly linked to their antebellum relationships.
A museum exhibition held in Charleston in 1988 entitled “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Rise of Black Churches in Eastern American Cities, 1740–1877” also noted Zion’s early involvement in the education of African Americans. The exhibition illustrated “the education of black children under church auspices after the Civil War, citing Charleston’s Zion Presbyterian Church school as an early example.” During Reconstruction African American churches such as Zion “became centers for political activity and black church leaders frequently entered the political arena.”94 This was no coincidence. There is a reason why this space was a center for political activity, education, leadership development, and promoting civic equalities for African Americans. As the antebellum choosing of the name Zion for the mission church was a symbol of deliverance and freedom so too was the postbellum choosing of the site as a space in which symbols could become realities.
It was natural for Zion Church to be associated with a place for education by the African American community during Reconstruction. “These schools, no more than the churches, did not drop suddenly from the sky on a people who previously had no interest in education. The African American Presbyterians and Congregationalists had been nurtured in a tradition that had emphasized the importance of education even while largely denying any formal education to them.”95 The classrooms used were the same rooms in which Girardeau and his class leaders had taught just six years earlier. This school would educate Page 155 →thousands of African American Charlestonians such as Zion’s first historian, Lois Simms. Zion contributed to education “culturally as well since the old Zion Church was a venue large enough to house concerts and commencement exercises.”96
Zion was also the initial place for the establishment of political leadership for African Americans in South Carolina during Reconstruction. “The meeting at Zion Church in Charleston during the late fall of 1865 was by all accounts unprecedented.” Experiencing the freedom of political expression for the first time many “black Charlestonians crowded into the Church’s galleries to hear the daily debates and to applaud speeches of their newly emergent, largely indigenous leadership at nightly mass meetings.” It was at Zion that “Black men–mostly freeborn and relatively affluent–met to demand new liberties and to fashion their first major political manifesto.”97 Zion was a space that enslaved African Americans felt was their own. After the war it was a space in which expanded ecclesiastical equalities occurred. Further Zion became a space in which African American freed persons first exercised their newly won political rights as citizens.
The antebellum Zion Presbyterian Mission Church was a space in which views of enslaved African American humanity, leadership, education, value, and dignity were challenged. By no means was it pushing for the civic rights of enslaved African Americans, but the very experiences of the membership underscored a subtle challenge to the status quo. The church’s existence pointed to a tension and a struggle within southern antebellum society. Were the enslaved human or chattel property? This subtle challenge, which was rooted in theological understandings of the imago dei and in the recognition that enslaved African Americans were human beings who deserved religious dignity and an independent space, perhaps provided a glimpse of a future, longed-for civic freedom. Freedom was unfulfilled, but the ecclesiastical opportunities experienced at Zion provided hope that other equalities might one day come.
At Zion Church during the postbellum era and the fall of 1865, previously enslaved peoples as the result of the bloodiest war in American history became freed persons and realized those hopes and dreams. The familiarity that existed within Zion among African Americans lent a sense of relaxed enthusiasm to the occasion as “the large church was too small to handle the crowd; the overflow spilled anxiously into the surrounding streets, where the stench of fire damage lingered still in this war-torn city.” Further “gnarled but enterprising old men and women with newly found economic liberties hawked peanuts and Page 156 →plied other sundries to black onlookers along Calhoun Street.” Such was the enthusiasm for freedom that organizers and ministers from Zion held “a massive parade to celebrate their day of jubilee.”98
Later in November of 1865, a convention of freed persons met to produce the “first statewide meeting of the Negro leadership for the announced purpose of ‘deliberating upon the plans best calculated to advance the interests of our people, to devise means for our mutual protection, and to encourage the industrial interests of the State.’”99 This convention, attended by forty-one African American delegates, took place at Zion Church. Zion became the space in which not only the first freed African Americans gained their education but where the political leadership of African American Charlestonians during Reconstruction emerged. While Adger’s and Girardeau’s efforts led to the building of this facility and began the ministry that happened within it, it was the African American community before the war that seized ministry opportunities and after the war continued education, religious leadership, political activity, and leadership development at Zion.
The African American leadership that Girardeau helped to establish in the 1850s and later ordained in 1869, went on to serve as a foundation for later guidance in the larger African American community in Charleston. Clarke pointed out the importance of the antebellum leaders and their continued significance after the Civil War: “Among important bearers of African American traditions were the old leaders or watchmen from the antebellum days.” These individuals “along with the lay elders, helped to keep alive (often to the frustration of those who sought the people’s ‘advancement’) the traditions of congregations that reached back many generations.”100
African Americans also used the Zion Church building as a place to discuss civil rights activities. “For years this church was reputedly the largest building for blacks in Charleston; it would remain a center for community activities long after the Civil War.”101 Reverend Metz later wrote that when the Zion-Olivet United Presbyterian Church merged in 1959 and relocated in 1964, its “long range goal was to prepare and equip the members of both church and the community to confront the institutions in Charleston and action oriented to help make them more responsive to the needs of human beings. In order to accomplish this goal, it has been necessary that the Zion-Olivet Church be progressive and action oriented.”102 In 1968, amid racial tensions across the South, ‘the Spacious temple of Zion,’ that Girardeau built for the black slaves, was demolished to make way for urban progress, so called.”103
Page 157 →In the 1970s the church’s leadership promoted civic equality. Indeed the mission statement at Zion in 1971 carried a deep sense of the importance of human rights and civil justice: “We at Zion believe that at our given location, the good news of God’s reconciling love should have impact in the areas of racisms, poverty, the quality of family life, and housing in the expanding community.” The congregation became activists in their new home at 134 Cannon Street believing that “love must take both the form of caring for the needs of individuals through direct services, and by equipping people to change or replace those systems and institutions which oppress or dehumanize human beings.”104 The remnant of what was once “Old Zion,” “Big Zion,” or “Girardeau’s Church” was now fighting for expanded civic freedoms for African Americans into the latter half of the twentieth century. This was part of the legacy of the enslaved African Americans who labored in the antebellum church, the freed persons who labored during Reconstruction but also the legacy of Girardeau, who only a century before had fought for expanded ecclesiastical freedoms within the PCUS. Zion-Olivet became an activist church for human rights and social justice in the 1970s but there is continuity over time with regard to the African American experience in this church going back to the 1840s.
Zion-Olivet also remembered and honored the work of the antebellum missionaries to enslaved persons, Girardeau and Adger, in 1948 on the church’s ninetieth anniversary. Reverend Sandy David Thom produced a souvenir booklet noting in the foreword that “we now come to this ninetieth anniversary with grateful hearts and souls overflowing with thanksgiving. This booklet is dedicated to the Honorable Past, the Prosperous Present and the Promising future.” He went on to remark, “Here we view the road long and dismal; the white friends that shepherded the slaves in the Second Presbyterian Church and later organized them into a separate Church. We can never know the great multitudes of lives that have been awakened . . . and must never forget or be ashamed to ‘Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.’”105 Throughout the booklet produced by this congregation of African Americans in the very midst of a segregated Jim Crow South, a sense of thanksgiving and remembrance appeared for the “white friends” who had “shepherded” the enslaved African Americans of the 1840s and 1850s. Within this booklet there was a large article entitled “Dr. Girardeau Devoted to Negro Work” filled with stories of his kindness and warmth towards African Americans, both slave and free.
Page 158 →The legacy of Girardeau and the Charleston Presbyterian missionaries to enslaved persons has had a far-reaching effect even into the twenty-first century when in 2002 the first African American, the Reverend Donnie Woods, was elected leader and executive presbyter of the Charleston-Atlantic Presbytery.106 African Americans of the Atlantic Presbytery in the twenty-first century were mindful of the history of Presbyterians in the nineteenth century, of which Girardeau and Adger were such integral parts. Woods remarked, “those traditions are to be respected for their long history and what they have contributed to the well being of each. All of that is a part of culture.” Woods has continued the work toward racial harmony by switching pastors with local White churches and choirs of Black and White churches regularly as well as mixing Bible studies, conferences, and camps to “give our young people the opportunity to begin building bridges.” Woods went on to say that through the building of bridges members of both races could learn to trust one another and that “it could help to ease some of the tension, some of the mistrust that exists, not only in society in general, but particularly in the church.” Woods said, “I think that if we are going to transform society, the church will have to take the lead.”
Certainly in the twentieth century, African Americans took the lead in attempting efforts toward racial healing, trust, and easing tension between races. In some ways enslaved African Americans and Girardeau began the process of bridge building between the two races more than a century ago, and Girardeau was the first to take the lead toward integrated worship, racial harmony, ordaining African Americans to be elders, and the building of bridges between the two races within a southern and largely White denomination.107 However, the overwhelming majority of White southern Presbyterians supported segregation, and this support continue into the twentieth century and into the 1980s and 1990s when it became acceptable for White southerners to engage in conversations on racial reconciliation.
When the Zion-Olivet United Presbyterian Church merged in 1959 and relocated in 1964, its long-range goal was to “prepare and equip the members of both church and the community to confront the institutions in Charleston and to help make them more responsive to the needs of human beings. In order to accomplish this goal, it has been necessary that the Zion-Olivet Church be both progressive and action oriented.”108 When F. P. Metz, pastor at Zion-Olivet in 1971, remarked, “We at Zion believe that at our given location, the good news of God’s reconciling love should have impact in the areas of racisms, poverty, the quality of family life, and housing in the expanding community. Page 159 →Love must take both the form of caring for the needs of individuals through direct services, and by equipping people to change or replace those systems and institutions which oppress or dehumanize human beings,” he was speaking of a much longer history than many were aware of.109
Girardeau’s postwar ministerial career in Charleston, South Carolina, was multifaceted. He was a slave missionary before the Civil War who became an advocate for ecclesiastical reform for freed persons during Reconstruction while simultaneously arguing that White Charlestonians should defend a Lost Cause, which would eventually undo any potential civic or social equality.110 Charlestonians, Presbyterians, Lost Cause advocates, educators, and scholars have all used his life and memory to display different aspects of religion’s role in the South. Presbyterians remember Girardeau as the great missionary to the enslaved persons who devoted his life to their spiritual growth, theological education, and leadership development. The administration of the College of Charleston erected a marble plaque in Randolph Hall in 1937 commemorating the college’s “first honor graduate” and “distinguished theologian” who was a “pioneer” in interracial work in the city. Scholars of the Lost Cause have viewed Girardeau as a staunch advocate of the Confederacy and representative of an unreconstructed mentality in the South. African Americans at Zion-Olivet Church, the remnant church of Girardeau’s Zion Mission, who were forced to leave the PCUS and join with the northern and later national Presbyterians (PCUSA), remember Girardeau as a benevolent missionary.
The memory and legacy of Girardeau is mixed based on who is speaking, which is indicative of the complex nature of southern interracial worship as it flowered and wilted during denominational conflicts and the rise of a Lost Cause civil religion. John Lafayette Girardeau’s legacy as an interracialist on matters of race and the church runs parallel to his career as an orator of the Lost Cause. Girardeau therefore complicates our understanding of southern White clergy and competing notions of masculinity, identity, and morality in the postwar South, while displaying how some White missionaries elected to promote racial ecclesiastical integration while also buttressing the Lost Cause.
Despite Girardeau’s efforts toward ecclesiastical reform, it was the Lost Cause that ultimately left a legacy on the post-Reconstruction South’s religious landscape. The southern population had the language and even authorization from Girardeau as a Confederate chaplain to maintain an antebellum order at all costs. The leading lights of Southern Presbyterianism not only helped defend an antebellum southern way of life in the postbellum South but also helped mobilize an embittered and resentful population toward reclaiming Page 160 →political, economic, and social control through violence. The church, an organization that was to be a place for all people, would become a steadfast bastion in the effort to fight for issues of racial inclusion.
While the legacy of Girardeau’s and Adger’s work in Charleston might be small within the larger framework of southern Presbyterianism, it does highlight the importance of sustained bridge building between races which, while intermittent over time, does continue in a variety of ways in Charleston. Certainly racial violence, tension, and resistance to African American equality have been the status quo in Charleston over three centuries. But there is also something to be said for the unique ways in which the Charleston community dealt with situations like the Mother Emmanual AME massacre, the murder of Walter Scott, and the ways in which White and African American communities came together in a show of biracial support after these 2015 events.
One can also continue to find examples like the Charleston City Council’s attempts to revive the Human Affairs and Racial Conciliation Commission, racial reconciliation book clubs, prayer meetings, and organizations like 1Charleston, a multiethnic group focused on racial reconciliation led by pastor Philip Pinckney of Radiant Church. Since 2015, White and Black churches in Charleston have become leaders in racial unity and healing and have hosted numerous events and programs on the topic. One historically White congregation, which is now Anglican (Anglican Church in North America), called the Cathedral Church of St. Luke and St. Paul, pastored by the Reverends Peet Dickinson and Patrick Schlabs, has actively studied its own racist past, its former leader’s commitment to enslavement, and begun racial healing efforts in Charleston while also providing resources to local African American congregations and communities in its neighborhood in hopes of beginning to repair prior economic damage caused by enslavement and segregation.
I would be remiss if I did not include the work of my own pastor when I was growing up, Apostle Herman Robinson, longtime pastor of Trinity Worldwide Outreach Ministries at 997 King Street in Charleston with my mother and my friend Heidi Ravenel. Herman was known his entire life for his work across racial lines in Charleston. He personally pastored me, a young White boy in Charleston, and my mother, Martha Westbrook Pickett, and her friend Heidi. We attended Herman’s weekly services, attended prayer meetings and Bible studies, most of which focused on racial healing and how to come together in love for one another. Herman served as the chaplain for the College of Charleston basketball team, and he was known across racial and denominational lines in Charleston for his passion to meet with, pray for, and help White Page 161 →folks understand the importance of racial unity. At his funeral in January 2019, there were almost as many White folks present as there were African Americans. Each person who gave a eulogy talked about Herman driving hundreds of miles a week across Charleston County to attend racial healing Bible studies and prayer meetings. There is a long legacy of racial violence, racism, White supremacy, and oppression in Charleston. But there are also stories of racial healing which have largely gone untold and that give this historian hope that we can one day achieve something resembling a beloved community here in South Carolina.