Fulfill Thy Ministry: Three Episcopal Clergymen, Race, and the Civil War Era

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. 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