This 2012 painting by Dale Gallon shows the end of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, when Union troops were pushed off Seminary Ridge and Gen. Rob- ert E. Lee’s army occupied the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg cam- pus. The new Gettysburg Seminary Ridge Museum focuses on that battle; human suffering and care; and the moral, civic and spiritual debates of the era.
been out of place even among South- ern Lutherans. “The ‘Salzberger Lutherans,’ refugees from Europe who came to Georgia in the 1730s seeking religious freedom, did not allow slavery in their settlement in the earliest colonial period,” she said, and as late as the 1820s the Tennessee Synod briefly took an anti-slavery stand. Lutheran churches throughout the South included black and white members. In fact, the percentage of African-American Lutherans in the U.S. reached its historic apogee in the years leading up to 1860. But there were limits to this inclusivity. “The fear of slave upris- ings led Southern states to outlaw any type of independent gathering of African-Americans, including church meetings,” McArver said. This meant they joined a white church, met in secret or “as was most common, participat[ed] in some combination of both,” she added. Some Southern Lutheran churches
became known as hospitable places for free people of color. In particular, John Bachman, pastor of St. John Lutheran, Charleston, S.C., led a large congregation including almost 200 enslaved and free African-Amer- icans. Bachman and these members supported the ministry of Jehu Jones, the first ordained African-American Lutheran pastor, and Boston Drayton, who became “not the first African- American missionary, but the first Lutheran missionary, period” to work in Africa, McArver said. But most Lutherans weren’t as
willing as their colonial-era fore- bears or the Franckeans to assert abolitionist sentiments so strongly— and many from the South were of a different mindset altogether. As secession began in winter 1860, tensions within the General Synod boiled toward the surface. Over time Southern Lutherans dis- missed abolitionism as theologically incorrect and proclaimed Northern- ers’ bad theology to be sufficient
grounds for secession. Postponed for a year, a General Synod meet- ing finally met in Lancaster, Pa., in May 1862, but the synods of South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, western Virginia and Texas failed to send delegates. With so many Southern delegates absent, synod opinion favored a much more strident assertion of Union support. The General Synod condemned secession as “wicked in its inception, unjustifiable in its cause, unnatural in its character, inhuman in its prosecution, oppres- sive in its aims, and destructive in its results to the highest interests of morality and religion.” The war itself was a “righteous
judgment of God” visited upon Americans for their individual and national sins, but most notably for “the continuance and spread of domestic slavery in our land.” Hailing calls for emancipation,
the delegates went on to pray God’s wisdom upon Lincoln and the mili- tary struggle to deliver the Union from “treason and anarchy.” Five General Synod representa- tives traveled to Washington, D.C., where they met with the president, and Albany, N.Y., pastor H.N. Pohl- man invoked “the divine benedic- tion upon the president and on their beloved country.”
Lincoln was recorded as accepting the petition “with gratitude” for their support of a conflict defending, “in my judgment ... the civil and religious liberties of mankind in many coun- tries and through many ages.” Southern Lutherans were out- raged by the General Synod’s actions. As with the nation, so went the Lutheran church. South Carolina had been the first of the Southern states to secede in December 1860. Now its synod was the first to break with the General Synod, calling upon others to do the same.
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COURTESY OF GETTYSBURG SEMINARY
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