Fulfill Thy Ministry

This book explores how race and enslavement shaped the Christian Church in nineteenth-century America by examining the post–Civil War responses of three white Episcopal clergymen from South Carolina—Peter Fayssoux Stevens, A. Toomer Porter, and William Porcher DuBose—which reveal how the Southern church grappled with the inclusion of freed Blacks, exposing the broader tensions, contradictions, and enduring legacies of racialized Christianity in American religious history.

Race and enslavement were the major issues confronting the Christian Church in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. During the antebellum era, churches debated whether their scriptures condoned race-based slavery. Following the Civil War and Emancipation, white church leaders in the South had three options: (1) Should formerly enslaved persons be welcomed into the segregated church and afforded the opportunity to choose their own leaders as well as make decisions about their congregations? (2) Should these freed people be allowed to join a segregated church governed by white clergy and lay leaders? (3) Should freed people be denied admission altogether? Of course a fourth option should have been an invitation for freed Blacks to join white churches as full members—but owing to the rampant racial discrimination of the time, and social mores, that was simply not considered, even by the most “liberal” Southern clergy.

To understand better how these Southern churches evaluated and made their choices in postwar nineteenth-century America, this book examines the lives and careers of three white Episcopal clergy from South Carolina: Peter Fayssoux Stevens (1830-1910), A. Toomer Porter (1828-1902), and William Porcher DuBose (1836-1918). These men present illuminating case studies because they were contemporaries and their early lives were remarkably similar, yet their responses to how the Southern church welcomed or rejected freed Blacks significantly diverged following the Civil War.

Each of these representative figures was born in antebellum South Carolina, reared in the Protestant Episcopal Church (PEC), and called to ministry. Porter and DuBose hailed from families made wealthy by the labor of enslaved persons. When war erupted in 1861, each man served the Confederate States of America (CSA). After the war, however, their attitudes toward race sharply differed. Peter Fayssoux Stevens left the PEC for the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) after Blacks were not afforded an opportunity to choose their own leadership within the PEC. A. Toomer Porter argued that Blacks had a place in Black PEC churches, but he continued working within the church even after white leaders rejected his petitions for change. William Porcher DuBose was a white supremacist who denied Black communicants a place within the postwar PEC.

Their responses to the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow can...read more...