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William Meade was an American Episcopal bishop, the third Bishop of Virginia.
Background
William Meade was born on the 11th of November, 1789, at Meadea, Virginia. He was the son of Col. Richard Kidder Meade, aide on Washington's staff during the Revolution, and his wife, Mary Fitzhugh (Grymes), widow of William Randolph. The father was a descendant of Andrew Meade who emigrated from County Cork, Ireland, about 1685, lived in New York for some five years, where he married Mary Latham, a Quakeress, and finally settled in Nansemond County, Va.
Education
Meade was home-schooled until he was ten, then sent to a school run by Rev. Wiley on the estate of Nathaniel Burwell. Rather than attend the College of William and Mary in Virginia, which some considered irreligious by the time, young Meade entered the college of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1806. Meade graduated with high honors and as valedictorian in 1808. Then he studied theology under the Rev. Walter Addison of Maryland.
Career
William Meade was ordained deacon in 1811 and priest in 1814; and preached both in the Stone Chapel, Millwood, and in Christ Church, Alexandria, for some time. He became assistant bishop of Virginia in 1829 and was pastor of Christ Church, Norfolk, in 1834-1836; in 1841 became bishop of Virginia. In 1842-1862 he was the president of the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, near Alexandria, delivering an annual course of lectures on pastoral theology. In 1819 he had acted as the agent of the American Colonization Society to purchase slaves, illegally brought into Georgia, which had become the property of that state and were sold publicly at Milledgeville. He had been prominent in the work of the Education Society, which was organized in 1818 to advance funds to needy students for the ministry of the American Episcopal Church, and in the establishment of the Theological Seminary near Alexandria, as he was afterwards in the work of the American Tract Society, and the Bible Society. He was a founder and president of the Evangelical Knowledge Society (1847), which, opposing what it considered the heterodoxy of many of the books published by the Sunday School Union, attempted to displace them by issuing works of a more evangelical type. A low Churchman, he, strongly opposed Tractarianism. He was active in the case against Bishop Henry Ustick Onderdonk of Pennsylvania, who because of intemperance was forced to resign and was suspended from the ministry in 1844; in that against Bishop Benjamin Tredwell Onderdonk of New York, who in 1845 was suspended from the ministry on the charge of intoxication and improper conduct; and in that against Bishop G. W. Doane of New Jersey. He fought against the threatening secession of Virginia, but acquiesced in the decision of the state and became presiding bishop of the Southern Church.
Meade was intensely interested in the spiritual condition of the negroes, preaching to them constantly and seeking to arouse interest in their welfare. Early in his ministry he liberated his slaves, although afterwards he believed that this was a mistaken kindness. The American Colonization Society and the establishment of Liberia owed much to him.
Quotations:
"The mind is perhaps one of the greatest factors in gymnastics; if one can't control his mind, he can't control his body."
Connections
On January 31, 1810, William Meade was married to Mary, daughter of his Frederick County neighbor and lay reader Philip Nelson. She bore his three sons before dying on July 3, 1817. On December 16, 1820, he remarried, to Thomasia, daughter of Thomas Nelson of Yorktown and Hanover, who zealously assisted him in his ministry for two decades before dying on May 20, 1836.