Stephen Elliott – Meridiana

March 24, 2020June 15, 2020

In Their Own Words: Stephen Elliott, “That the Past May be Vindicated”

*The Burial of Latané* painted by William Dickinson Washington in 1864 shows the solidarity of white women and children and their slaves as they bury and mourn the death of a Confederate cavalry officer. For generations after the war, this depiction of white women’s devotion and the “faithful slave” served white Americans as a history lesson on the “Lost Cause” of the antebellum South. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

But for [the emancipated slaves] I see no future in this country. Avarice and cupidity and interest will do for their extinction what they have always done for an unprotected inferior race. Poverty, disease, intemperance will follow in their train and do the rest.
Stephen Elliott, May 1866

In February we published (in two parts) an 1862 sermon by the Rt. Rev. Stephen Elliott, bishop of Georgia, that lays out his understanding and defense of slavery as “a divine arrangement.” Elliott placed the godly purpose of slavery at the heart of the Civil War, another historical instrument by which, he believed, the Christian god was advancing his will in the world. God, he explained, “has caused the African race to be planted here under our political protection and under our christian nurture, for his own ultimate designs, and he will keep it here under that culture until the fulness of his own times.”

February 11, 2020June 15, 2020

In Their Own Words: Stephen Elliott, “Our cause in harmony with the purposes of God in Christ Jesus” (Part 2)

Today we publish the second part of the sermon by the Right Rev. Stephen Elliott. Here, in his own words, he defends the institution of slavery as “a sacred trust from God,” the cause the Confederacy was founded to defend and protect, and the cause of the Civil War that had killed more than 200,000 by the time he spoke these words in September 1862. The bracketed numbers in the text here refer to the pages in the published sermon, which may be read in its entirety on this website.

February 4, 2020June 15, 2020

In Their Own Words: Stephen Elliott, “Our cause in harmony with the purposes of God in Christ Jesus” (Part 1)

The Rt. Rev. Stephen Elliott. He was the first Bishop of Georgia and the first and only Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America.

The great revolution [of Civil War] through which we are passing certainly turns upon this point of slavery, and our future destiny is bound up with it.

Stephen Elliott, September 4, 1862

Of the three Episcopal bishops who launched the campaign in 1856 to found a “Southern university,” Georgia’s Stephen Elliott has received less recognition than Leonidas Polk of Louisiana and James Hervey Otey of Tennessee. But Elliott deserves greater attention especially for his eloquence in articulating a Christian mission for human bondage and for his influence in designing the University of the South as an instrument in the realization of that mission.

About This Site

The Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation aims to bring together the Sewanee community — students, staff, faculty, alumni, and area residents — to pursue a comprehensive examination and thoughtful consideration of our university’s historic entanglement in the institution of slavery and its legacies in the long century of racial injustice after the end of the Civil War.

The title of our blog – the Latin for “of the South” – is drawn from the formal name that appears on diplomas awarded at Sewanee: Universitas Meridiana. Adopting this prepositional phrase for our online publication expresses our position that this investigation and the understanding that we derive from it are essential in determining what it means to be a leading university of and for the twenty-first century South.

This blog will publish features drawn from our research and sponsored events in order to share with the larger public the work we are pursuing.

About our header image: The chief founders of the University of the South, including the Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana, the Rt. Rev. Leonidas Polk, all had long histories as both slaveholders and defenders of the slaveholding order when they launched the campaign for a university “of the South” in 1856. The header image of our blog is a stark indicator of these southern histories. It is cropped from an 1855 bill of sale for landed and enslaved property in Bolivar County, Mississippi, belonging to Bishop Polk and his son Alexander Hamilton Polk. The Polks liquidated their 2,700-acre plantation and its enslaved labor force to cover personal debts owed to a pair of merchants out of New Orleans. The buyer of the land and persons in this case was James H. Yerger, the sheriff of Washington County, Mississippi. The sale document shown here itemizes the names and ages of the enslaved persons sold by the Polks.