Clergy Dissent in the Old South 1830-1865

[L Verge]

I was surprised at the use of the term High Anglican instead of Episcopalian. I am the latter, and there's a big leap for me from Episcopalian to High Anglican. I served as organist for a High Anglican priest for about ten years in our parish. They are more Catholic than the Catholics - at least they were then. Not so sure what the various ecumenical councils have done over the years to water down the liturgy.

To advance from Baptist to High Anglican must have been mind-boggling. Did Varina make him do it?

[LincolnToddFan]

(03-08-2015 11:43 AM)Wild Bill Wrote:  No, on the arch bishop. He was advancing in class status from low church to high church. The episcopal church was considered more upper classy.

This is absolutely true. I was reading the memoirs of one of Lena Horne's daughters and she was discussing the religious attitudes of the "high yellow" bourgeois class of African-Americans who are her ancestors and of which she herself is a member. Her exact statement was that these people "wouldn't be caught dead" in a Baptist or Pentecostal church. Those were the denominations most associated with the lower caste of Blacks and newly freed slaves. Upwardly mobile Blacks attended the Episcopal Church or converted to Catholicism.

As repugnant as I found it, I appreciated her honesty.

Yet how sad it all makes me, that anyone tailor their church attendance to their desire for social acceptance.

[L Verge]

I think I have become fixated on the subject of Jefferson Davis's conversion to the Episcopal High Church as well as his friendship with Pius IX. I have subsequently found these tidbits:

He was educated for awhile in a Dominican school in Kentucky and wanted to convert at that time, but his parents objected. His later conversion came through his West Point friendship with Leonidas Pope, who, in addition to being a Confederate general, was also a bishop in the Episcopal Church.

Davis developed a friendship with Pius IX when he sought the Pope's help when Northern agents tried to recruit Polish and Irish mercenaries. Pius assisted because he did not want the American conflict to become an international affair.

Davis and Pius IX shared many views and opinions and had a shared outlook toward the world and politics in the sense that they believed in the old world of honour, courtesy, hierarchy, chivalry and the land. For this reason, too, all Catholic bishops in the South supported the Confederacy.

The Sisters of Charity supported Varina Davis and their children while the Confederate President was imprisoned at Fortress Monroe.

[LincolnToddFan]

Pius IX and Jefferson Davis did indeed share the same worldview, most significantly that slavery was not incompatible with Christianity. The first pope to condemn slavery in the strongest terms was Pius's successor Leo XIII, in his 1888 encyclical "On The Abolition of Slavery"

"....In the presence of so much suffering, the condition of slavery, in which a considerable part of the great human family has been sunk in squalor and affliction now for many centuries, is deeply to be deplored; for the system is one which is wholly opposed to that which was originally ordained by God and by nature. The Supreme Author of all things so decreed that man should exercise a sort of royal dominion over beasts and cattle and fish and fowl, but never that men should exercise a like dominion over their fellow men. As St. Augustine puts it: "Having created man a reasonable being, and after His own likeness, God wished that he should rule only over the brute creation; that he should be the master, not of men, but of beasts." From this it follows that "the state of slavery is rightly regarded as a penalty upon the sinner; thus, the word slave does not occur in the Bible until the just man Noe branded with it the sin of his son. It was sin, therefore, which deserved this name; it was not natural."

http://www.ewtn.com/library/encyc/l13abl.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Ch...nd_slavery

[Anita]

Amen!


Story Written for Noah Brooks [1]
[December 6, 1864]

THE PRESIDENT'S LAST, SHORTEST, AND BEST SPEECH.

On thursday of last week two ladies from Tennessee came before the President asking the release of their husbands held as prisoners of war at Johnson's Island. They were put off till friday, when they came again; and were again put off to saturday. At each of the interviews one of the ladies urged that her husband was a religious man. On saturday the President ordered the release of the prisoners, and then said to this lady ``You say your husband is a religious man; tell him when you meet him, that I say I am not much of a judge of religion, but that, in my opinion, the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government, because, as they think, that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread on the sweat of other men's faces, is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven!''

A. LINCOLN.
Annotation

[1] ADS, MeHi. Nicolay and Hay date this item ``December 3, 1864'' (X, 279), while Tracy dates it ``Nov.---, 1864'' (pp. 248-49.) December 3 was on Saturday, which would seem from Lincoln's narrative to have been in the past at the time of writing. December 6 has been assigned because the item appeared in the Washington Daily Chronicle on December 7, 1864. Noah Brooks records the circumstances under which it was written:

``. . . Upon another occasion, hearing that I was in the parlor, he sent for me to come up into the library, where I found him writing on a piece of common stiff box-board with a pencil. Said he, after he had finished, `Here is one speech of mine which has never been printed, and I think it worth printing. Just see what you think.' He then read the following, which is copied verbatim from the familiar handwriting before me: [text as above]

``To this the President signed his name at my request, by way of joke, and added for a caption, `The President's Last, Shortest, and Best Speech,' under which title it was duly published in one of the Washington newspapers. . . .'' (``Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,'' Harper's New Monthly Magazine, July, 1865, p. 230).

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/linc...w=fulltext