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The Episcopal Church abstained from adopting an official position, but Hopkins was one of its loudest voices on the explosive issue of slavery–he offered a qualified defense of it. It could not be considered sinful, he argued, because it was not condemned in the Old Testament and was never mentioned by Jesus at all. Moreover, it benefitted the slaves, members of an inferior race who otherwise would be sunk in the darkness of African barbarism and deprived of the opportunity for eternal salvation that Christianity affords. It was therefore incumbent upon White Christians to support laws that upheld it.
Nevertheless, Bishop Hopkins wished for the extinction of slavery due to its harmful effects on White society! It fostered White laziness, provided opportunities for White sexual immorality, exposed Whites to the danger of slave violence, and sowed national discord. But the means for abolishing slavery, he believed, should be gradual, voluntary, and left to those who understood it best–the slave owners. His sympathy with the Southern perspective was reinforced by his friendship with two pro-slavery Southern Episcopal bishops, one of whom was to resign his episcopate on the outbreak of war for service as a Major General in the Confederate States Army where, as the slave-owning “Fighting Bishop,” he was killed in action, blown in half by a Federal cannon shell.
Of course, Hopkins’ hope that his proposal might head off open conflict between North and South failed, and that failure split the Episcopal Church as well as the country. In 1862, “The Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America” was launched at a “General Council” in Augusta, Georgia. Like the Confederacy, it was short-lived.
At war’s end, who should have occupied the office of Presiding Bishop but Hopkins! He had been elected in January 1865 by virtue of his status as senior bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church. But it was a divided church, and Hopkins took it upon himself to reunite it.
The stage was to be the General Convention scheduled to meet in Philadelphia in October 1865, and Hopkins proposed to invite the Southern bishops. Receiving little support for the idea from their Northern counterparts, Hopkins unilaterally issued the invitations. In fact, only three Southern bishops attended, but they were well-received and the ball of reunification had started to roll. By 1868, all Southern dioceses had rejoined the national church.
Bishop Hopkins died in January of that year. Most of what he had said on the subject of slavery is shockingly offensive to contemporary ears. Of course, he should be judged by the standards of his time, not ours, but many of his Northern contemporaries held more enlightened views than his.
Hopkins had been motivated by a desire to preserve the unity of the country and the Episcopal Church. It was naïve of him to believe that his ideas could achieve that end, but perhaps he should be remembered with a hint of charity as an agent of postwar healing. But were our wounded country and Church really healed?
-Jim Weingartner
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