(Excerpt from Miscellanies, Comprising Letters, Essays, an...)
Excerpt from Miscellanies, Comprising Letters, Essays, and Addresses: To Which Is Added a Biographical Sketch of Mrs. Ann Amelia Andrew Delays Galveston Bay Paradise for Cows Galveston OS for New Orleans by the Neptune Mobile Home Review of Tex, O 0 0 0 o v c 1. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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James Osgood Andrew was born on May 3, 1794 in Wilkes County, Georgia, United States. His father, Rev. John Andrew, was the first native Georgian that ever entered the itinerant ministry of the Methodist Church (1789); but after only three years in the traveling connection he located and became a country school-teacher. His wife, whose maiden name was Mary Cosby, is described as a woman of many domestic virtues, of more than ordinarily strong intellect, fine taste, and deep piety.
Andrew's educational opportunities were limited to what he could get in country schools and from reading such books as a home of severe poverty made possible.
He was converted and joined the church when he was fifteen years of age. Taking up the duties of an assistant "class-leader" soon after, he exhibited, in spite of his youth, such gifts of religious leadership as indicated his fitness for the ministry.
With considerable hesitation he took out a license to preach when he was eighteen; during the ensuing months he preached often to Negroes, and in the latter part of the same year applied for and obtained admission on trial to the South Carolina Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. During his first twenty years in the ministry he served various charges in Georgia and the Carolinas, from the humblest country circuit to the largest city stations.
He proved himself efficient both in pulpit and pastoral work and in leadership, so that when the General Conference met in Philadelphia in 1832 and decided to elect two bishops, he was speedily chosen as the first of the two. It is not often that marriage so seriously affects a man's public career as it did Bishop Andrew's.
Through marriage he became a slaveholder. His first wife inherited from her mother a Negro boy, who on the death of this wife became the property of the bishop. He at once declared that although the laws of Georgia did not permit owners to free their slaves if they remained in the state, the boy was at liberty to leave the state and locate elsewhere as soon as he chose to do so under conditions which would guarantee that he would be well taken care of. But the bishop became further, and more seriously, involved when he married his second wife, a cultured and estimable woman, who was the owner of slaves inherited from her former husband. Immediately following this marriage he executed legal papers renouncing for himself all personal property rights in the ownership and control of these slaves.
But when the General Conference met in New York, in May 1844, so intense was the feeling of the Northern delegates against a bishop's owning slaves, or being the husband of a wife who owned them, that after several days of strenuous debate in the Conference, a resolution was passed by a vote of 110 to 68 to the effect that Andrew should desist from the exercise of his episcopal office until his connection with the ownership of slaves should cease.
From the beginning of the controversy he had expressed a perfect willingness to resign his episcopal office, but the entire body of Southern delegates were a unit in their insistence that he should not do so, declaring in justification of their position that such a surrender to Northern anti-slavery opinion would be disastrous to the church in the South, where a large proportion of the influential ministers and members of all religious denominations were themselves slaveholders.
It was in every way desirable, they contended, that the church through its ministry should have free access both to slave-owners and their slaves; this access, it was declared, would be denied to them, or greatly limited, by the owners of the slaves throughout the South if Bishop Andrew should be forced to resign his office under the pressure of Northern abolition and anti-slavery sentiment.
The Southern delegates in the main, as their speeches indicated, agreed fully with the delegates from the North in regarding slavery as a social and moral evil that should be abolished, but they took the position that slavery in the Southern section of the Union was not only a moral and religious, but also a political, social, and economic question. An evil of this nature, they held, could be best dealt with by helping to create and develop public sentiment until the growing opposition to slavery would find expression in a nationwide demand for emancipation.
But until that time should come, the Southern leaders contended, the church should adapt itself in the South to existing conditions, and go on with its work in the slaveholding states, preaching alike to slaveowners and their slaves after the manner suggested by Saint Paul in his Epistle to Philemon. In holding these views Bishop Andrew and other Southern leaders in the General Conference were true representatives and exponents of the attitude and sentiment that prevailed among religious people generally in the Southern states.
The result was that a "Plan of Separation" and division of the Church was drawn up and passed by the General Conference, looking to the organization of all the Annual Conferences in the slaveholding states into an independent and self-governing Southern church as soon as it should be determined that this was the desire of the ministers and members of the Methodist Episcopal Church residing in these states.
In keeping with this "Plan" representatives from all the Southern Annual Conferences met in a convention in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 1845, and formed an organization under the name of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. This convention was presided over in turn by Bishop Joshua Soule and by Bishop Andrew. The first session of the General Conference of the newly organized Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was held (obedient to the action of the Louisville Convention) at Petersburg, Virginia, in May 1846; when the episcopal credentials of Joshua Soule and James Andrew were duly recognized, and they thus became the first bishops of the Southern Church.
Bishop Andrew continued in the active exercise of his office until the meeting of the first General Conference held after the close of the Civil War, in New Orleans in May 1866, when he requested and was granted a superannuated relation, and retired from active work. On a visit to New Orleans in the early spring of 1871 he was prostrated by a sudden attack and died after being removed to the home of his daughter, the wife of the Rev. J. W. Rush, in Mobile, Alabama.
Bishop Andrew was a frequent contributor to the religious weekly papers of the Church. He published an excellent treatise on Family Government (1847). His volume of Miscellanies (1855) contains his "Letters of Travel, " extending over many years, several addresses on missions, and various other papers, including an extended biographical sketch of his first wife.
Andrew became a famous, but controversial figure in history, and the symbol of the slavery issue that divided the church in 1844 and instigated the separation of northern and southern Methodist Episcopalians the following year. He was the first bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and a founding trustee of Central University, a Methodist university, in 1858. During his career, Andrew contributed to religious periodicals and published two books.
(Excerpt from Miscellanies, Comprising Letters, Essays, an...)
Andrew was a Episcopalian and devoted his whole life to this denomination.
He was married three times: first, in 1816, to Ann Amelia McFarlane, who was the mother of three daughters and one son, and died in 1842; second, in 1844, to Mrs. Leonora Greenwood, who died in 1854; third, to Mrs. Emily Sims Childers.
