USA > Alabama > History of the Protestant Episcopal church in Alabama, 1763-1891 > Part 13
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At this juncture a few clergymen and laymen, over -. zealous for the cause of education, made certain propo- sitions which were formulated and urged by the Rev. Dr. Everhart, lessee of the school. In a pamphlet published by this reverend gentleman in 1887 the position was taken that no portion of the Hamner Hall property could justly be devoted to the support . of the Episcopate, save the amount of principal and
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interest of the debt of St. John's parish to the Bishop's Fund, and that after this claim was satisfied the re- mainder of the property, which he estimated as worth two hundred thousand dollars (so incredibly inflated were prices), should be held in trust for a Girls' School, which, with such an endowment, could be maintained with merely nominal tuition.
It was a position that many have taken under simi- lar circumstances. It was a position that none was ever known to take when the property taken for debt decreased in value. Hamner Hall, when accepted by the trustees of the Bishop's Fund was not worth more than the debt of St. John's parish for which it was re- ceived. Subsequent fluctuations of value were mat- ters of concern to the Bishop's Fund alone. Had the property at forced sale brought less than the debt, none would have suggested that the deficit would be a perpetual claim against any diocesan girls' school of the future. If there was no reponsibility under adver- sity, there could be no privilege in prosperity. The Bishop's Fund was not wedded to education " for bet- ter, " unless also "for worse. "*
Dr. Everhart's untenable position was not long left unassailed. The trustees of the Bishop's Fund-N. H. R. Dawson, of Selma, and J. H. Fitts, of Tuska-
* The celebrated case of Gilmer vs. Josiah Morris, which was fought all through the state and Federal courts, hinges on precisely the principles involved in this case of Hamner Hall. It is well worth studying in connection with this chap- · ter, as it was decided in accordance with the views enunciated in the last paragraph written above.
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loosa-submitted to the ensuing Council a voluminous report in which they reviewed the history of Hamner Hall with great minuteness and demonstrated the legal and the ethical unsoundness of Dr. Everhart's contention. Their language was not lacking in vigor: "You are requested to spoliate and destroy a sacred trust; " "The purpose of these persons is to wrest this property from the possession of the present own- ers, thus subverting the design of the original found- ers and destroying at one single blow the morals and good faith of the Convention. "
It has generally been the diocesan Council's custom to postpone consideration of momentous matters for at least twelve months, especially when discussion has engendered or threatens to engender acrimony. In this case the Council of 1887 was true to its tradition. A warm discussion followed the trustees report, and the temperature of the Council was rapidly nearing 212º Fahrenheit when the entire matter was, in the interest of harmony, referred to a committee of three lawyers, with instructions to report to the next annual Council the legal status of Hamner Hall. This com- mittee, consisting of F. B. Clark, Jr., of Mobile, and H. C. Tompkins and Horace Stringfellow, Jr., of Montgomery, made a clear, succinct report the follow- ing year, fully upholding the report of the trustees of the Bishop's Fund, showing that the increased value of the property was wholly irrelevant to the question of ownership, and concluding with the pregnant, comprehensive words: "The proceeds of such sale [i. e., should the trustees see fit to sell the property],
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regardless of the amount it may bring, will be subject to the same trusts that the other property and money held by the trustees of the Bishop's Fund is subject to, and will be subject to none other." The Council concurred in this report.
Dr. Everhart's lease expired the following year (1889). For the last few years the school had not been successful, either numerically or financially, and the lessee did not care to continue longer his thank- less attempt. No one else came forward to lengthen the list of failures. The property was therefore rented, first as a boarding-house, and afterwards as a private school for boys. A street was opened along the south side, and another at right angles to this, dividing the whole property into two equal parts. That on the east was subdivided into building lots, and many of these lots being sold on deferred payments with legal interest, the Bishop's Fund was soon growing rapidly from the constant accretion of these small sums, and the proceeds were promptly invested in registered Alabama bonds.
Some lots still remain to be sold. The school build- ing and surrounding lot are rented, and are held by direction of the Council in hope that changed condi- tions will yet inake the school the nursery of the Churchwomen of Alabama.
Inasmuch as the Churchmen of Alabanta have been admonished, collectively and individually, that the failure of Hamner Hall as a diocesan school for girls has been a rebuke to their Churchmanship, and have been advised to increase their shame by considering
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the prosperity of denominational schools, especially of Baptist and Methodist schools, it is not amiss to inquire what ground exists for rebuke and self-accu- sation.
Hamner Hall was dependent, of course, on two classes of pupils-day pupils and boarding pupils. The parents of day pupils demand two things of a girls' school-accessibility and reasonable expense. Hamner Hall met neither of these demands. It would have been hard to locate in Montgomery a more inac- cessible school. The majority of prospective patrons lived a mile or more away. In its earlier days public conveyances were lacking. Later on mule-cars brought the school nearer some of the pupils; but about this time the public school system sprang into prominence. These public schools were good. Their pupils received instruction at least as thorough as that given in private schools. Parents began to tire of paying tuition at one school while yet they were taxed to support another. Little by little the local patron- age fell away, and the strenuous efforts made to coun- teract the inevitable were futile.
Different causes operated to reduce the boarding patronage. "Church School " was the shibboleth at first, but later it could not be relied on to hold Church- men. Denominational schools have no reason for be- ing unless they inculcate denominational teaching- that is, the Gospel as understood by the denomination to which appeal is made. So, a Church school that suppresses, or even neglects, any legitimate Church influence, ceases to have any claim on Churchmen on
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the ground that they are Churchmen. It may have a most excellent corps of teachers, a thorough curric- ulum, and an educator of note at its head, but if the teachers are chosen from different religious bodies for the purpose of drawing pupils from families connected with this denomination or that, and if, when these pupils are secured, certain changes are made in the devotional exercises, habits, and regulations of the school, in order that their feelings may not be hurt, then the school becomes to all intents and purposes simply a " non-denominational school," the strongest reason that could impel Churchmen to send their daughters to an expensive school is deliberately destroyed, and the most zealous Churchman is free to select that or any other " non-denominational school." This objection was raised against Hamner Hall school, if not justly, still for no inconsiderable portion of its existence. It was altogether legitimate for a lessee of the property to conduct the school according to his own plans and ideals. But when this was done with- out regard to the demands of Churchmanship the esprit du corps of the Church-folk of Alabama could no longer be invoked legitimately. *
Reference has been made to the matter of expense.
* In at least one portion of its existence this objection to Hamner Hall had no ground. In 1881 Dr. Everhart made the following report of religious exercises : "The chapel ser- vices consist of the Morning Prayer, beginning with the Lord's Prayer, and omitting one Lesson, and substituting more appropriate Collects for some of those in the regular order. On Fridays, the Litany is intoned. All the services are cho- ral in part, except Compline."
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This was a potent factor in the decay of the school. A Church school must be conducted along economical lines. Its charges must bear some proportion to the financial ability of its prospective patrons. No matter how large are the salaries of high-priced teachers and the expenses of proffered luxuries, there is a limit be- yond which parents, however appreciative, cannot go. . Almost every boarding-pupil represents some self-sac- rifice at home, and when luxury for daughters means drudgery for mothers it is small wonder that fathers send their children to schools where the curriculum is not inferior, though luxury and the cost thereof are markedly less. The management of Hamner Hall fell into the error of supposing that the Churchmen of Alabama were, as a rule, wealthy ; the charges were made according to the supposition ; and Church girls went to lower-priced schools.
The strongest reason for the failure of the school as a diocesan institution remains to be considered. The strength of boarding-schools is in the villages and the country, where local educational advantages are meager. They receive few pupils from the cities and larger towns. Where boarding pupils for a Church- school were to be obtained if obtained at all, just there Churchmen were found in the smallest proportion. Always three-fourths of the Churchmen of Alabama have lived in the towns and cities. The boarding- pupils must come from the other one-fourth. This fraction comprised about four hundred families. Four hundred country families yield few boarding pupils
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to even the lowest-priced schools. To Hamner Hall they yielded a mere handful.
These causes, then,-the inaccessibility of the school to day-pupils, the rise of the public-school system, the reputedly interdenominational character of the school, the great expense, and the unfavorable distribution of . Churchmen-sufficiently explain the failure of Hamner Hall as a diocesan school for girls, and explain it without reflection upon the laity of Alabama. The diocese willl never have in successful operation the girls' school that it needs until women consecrated to God shall, with expectations of naught but their daily bread, give themselves to the cause. Thus the school shall rise superior to unfavorable conditions, and furnish forth a higher, Christian, Churchly education, at a cost commensurate with the ability of the great body of our laity.
CHAPTER X.
EDIFICATION AND DEMOLITION.
T HE half-century of diocesan life now closing has been marked by three waves of prosperity, fol- lowed by three troughs of depression.
The first wave-length embraced the closing days of Bishop Cobbs' episcopate and the years of civil war.
The second began in the early days of peace, and ended with the financial panic of 1873.
The third followed close upon the cessation of gen- eral insecurity, and overlapped the local catastrophe of " Boom Times," by which social and diocesan con- ditions of life were revolutionized.
Through the entire fifty years edification and demoli- tion have never been far apart, yet through all the changes the progress of the diocese, though peculiar, has been steady. It now becomes our task to point out and study the conditions of this growth through the last two periods.
When peace was restored the diocese was slow to take her bearings. Alabama had been the least troubled section of the South, and many clergymen and laymen had sought a measure of peace and quiet within its borders. At the close of the war most of these strangers went back home., The departure of the clergy left a number of parishes vacant, and the departure of the laymen impaired the finances of other congregations. In Montgomery an entire par- -16 233
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ish was thus obliterated. Many refugees from Pensa- cola, Fla., had come to Montgomery, and with them their minister, the Rev. J. J. Scott, formerly a clergy- man of this diocese. These organized the parish of the Holy Comforter in May, 1864. In another year or two the rector and almost the whole congregation had returned to Pensacola. The remnant, a few Montgomerians that had attached themselves to an exotic congregation, maintained a nominal organiza- tion for two or three years longer, under the rector- ship of the Rev. J. H. Ticknor; but the parish died at the early age of five years.
In the single Conventional year of 1865-6 letters dimissory were given to twelve clergymen, who con- stituted more than one-third of the entire clerical force. Their departure was a serious loss to the dio- cese, for among them were John W. Beckwith, after- wards Bishop of Georgia; A. Gordon Bakewell, now of New Orleans; Henry Sansom, now of Vicksburg; and George F. Cushman, who had been chosen to preach the Council sermon in memory of Bishop Cobbs, and who afterwards was associate editor of The Churchman. Demopolis and Selma were doubly bereaved; their ministers were not, and their churches had been burned by Federal soldiers.
There was much, indeed, to discourage, but the prospect was not of Cimmerian darkness. Northern dioceses and ecclesiastics were emphasizing and strengthening the unity of the Church by proffering little courtesies to their sisters and brethren in the afflicted South. Gladly did wealthy Churchmen of
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the East help the crippled missionary work of the South to its feet; and their liberality was unstinted until it was checked by the misunderstandings of reconstruction days. The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society appropriated three thousand dol- lars for a single year's work in the diocese, and in the same year a layman of Louisville, Ky., gave a thousand dollars more. With four thousand dollars from without the diocese the Bishop was enabled for a short time to put in execution his cherished plan of sending out evangelists to care for the scattered hand- fuls of people that were not under the stated ministra- tions of any other clergyman. The Rev. W. J. Per- due was evangelist along the Selma, Rome & Dalton Railroad, with headquarters at Wilsonville, and the Rev. Thomas J. Beard for North Alabama, with head- quarters at Athens. No report was ever made of Mr. Perdue's work, but the reports of Mr. Beard showed that he was holding stated services at Maysville, Madison Station, Mooresville, Athens, Decatur, Tus- cumbia, Florence, Triana, and Courtland. Through- out this field the prospects were especially promising.
Bishop Wilmer was much pleased with his twelve months' evangelistic experiment, and sought at the be- ginning of the next year to add yet another to the corps of workers. Along the line that may be said to divide Middle and North Alabama the Church was unusually weak; but the few communicants scattered here and there were Christians and Churchmen. They were also possible nuclei of congregations. At Ely- ton, Montevallo, Alpine, Harpersville, Talladega,
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Gainesville, Jonesboro, Lime Kiln, Silver Run, and Brierfield, were from two to fourteen communicants each. For this virgin field which Mr. Perdue seems scarcely to have touched the Bishop was earnestly seeking a missionary of the necessary staying and moving powers ; when one day he was notified by the Domestic and Foreign Missionary, which was at that time beginning to extend foreign missions at the ex- pense of domestic, that it had cut off twelve hundred dollars from the appropriation to Alabama. In the face of this reduction extension was out of the ques- tion ; it were well to support what was already in hand. The diocese was straining every nerve to give the clergy a scanty and uncertain support. No fixed amount was promised the Bishop ; and, except a few of the more favored in old and substantial parish- es, all the clergy, from bishop to youngest deacon, were entirely dependent on voluntary offerings, and were harassed with those temporal cares from which they should have been free, but which, since they must bear them, enabled them to sympathize as never before with their people. A reduced force, the result of their labors was unprecedented in the history of diocese.
There was no fatalistic yielding to circumstances, and no Micawberish waiting for something to turn up. Many were the schemes, some fruitless, some fruitful, for the welfare of the diocese. A few of these de- serve notice : The publication of a Church paper, and the attempts to organize the missionary work and to systematize the financial operations of the Church.
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The publication of a diocesan paper was suggested as early as 1867. The project was licked into shape in two Conventions, and in June, 1868, the paper was launched with the name The Church Register. The Rev. J. H. Ticknor of Montgomery was at the helm. It was literally a venture of faith. Today when Churchmen in this diocese and throughout the South are twice and thrice as numerous as they were thirty years ago, the projector of a weekly Church journal, to be published in this portion of the country, would be a bold man. Mr. Ticknor's confidence was soon and rudely dispelled. Though the paper was cor- dially endorsed by the Bishops of Mississippi and Louisiana, and they promised to urge its circulation in their respective dioceses, the bulk of the circulation must be in Alabama. It was hoped that the weekly visits of such a paper, given, as it was, less to news than to instruction, would be the means of enlarging the borders of the Church. But faith does not come by reading, and the non-Churchman to whomn appeal was made was the very man that could not be per- suaded to read what was written for him. A few of the faithful were marvellously edified, but the paper failed to achieve its main purpose. It was well edited, and Mr. Ticknor labored unselfishly and untiringly to keep it alive; but he was in the field fifty years too soon, and finally succumbed to the apathy and luke- warmness that are the common attitude of many of the clergy and most of the laity towards Church period- icals, whether general or diocesan. Three other at- tempts at a diocesan paper have since been made. In
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1878 the Rev. George H. Hunt of Tuskaloosa tested the diocese with a monthly twenty-four-page magazine, The Old Church Path, which, though with few supe- riors in the plainness, directness, and simplicity of its instruction, was also but short-lived. In 1889 the Rev. L. W. Rose of Birmingham published The Ala- bama Churchman for a few months. Not until 1892 was a diocesan paper permanently established. Its first name, The Diocese of Alabama, proving unwieldly and confusing, was after a year changed to The Church Record. It was first published in Montgomery, but was after two years removed to Tuskaloosa, where it is now located. It has been of invaluable assistance in keeping the various portions and interests of the diocese in touch with one another.
Bishop Wilmer insisted from the first that what the diocese needed for its financial salvation was system. Somehow it had become the tradition that faith and method were opposed to each other, that the weekly pledge destroyed the free-will offering, that to tie one's camel was to evince distrust of God. But fervent an- nual appeals and spasmodic efforts are not the way that either reason or revelation teaches us is best to meet demands that are not spasmodic. Persistent ex- penses must be met, if they are to be met properly, by perennial income.
In like manner the evangelization of Alabama must not be by haphazard methods, but according to settled plan and on well-defined responsibility. This respon- sibility rested ultimately on the shoulders of the Bishop. He was encouraged to go forward, but he
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was not provided with funds for the maintenance of outposts. He had no appointed advisers as to the dis- position of the missionaries and the allotment of funds. Such trust showed perfect confidence in the Bishop. It worked well in the outgo, because it fixed on one man the whole responsibility for wise expendi- ture ; but it worked ill in the income, because " the diocese " bore that responsibitity, and in matters having no legal bearing the diocese is always an in- tangible entity without identity.
The Bishop sought such organization of the mis- sionary work in its executive department as would delegate to the parochial clergy and the laity a portion of the responsibility that he was bearing, and arouse in them as individuals a sense of the necessity for sys- tematic endeavor to develop the sinews of war. His leading idea was to divide the diocese into Convoca- tions, and make each Convocation answerable for Church extension within its borders. The Conven- tion of 1869 fell in with this plan and adopted a quasi convocational system. The Convocations were to be five in number and were to be known as the Convoca- tions of Mobile, Montgomery, Selma, Demopolis, and Huntsville. Each Convocation was to be autono- mous, with such officers and regulations as were not in conflict with the diocesan law .*
Unhappily, these Convocations did not come to the birth. For a year or so, it is true, two or three clergy-
* The proposed distribution of Convocatious gives incident- al witness to the congestion of the Church in the Black Belt -three out of the five Convocations being in that region.
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men would meet in one another's parish and hold double daily services after the fashion of a Virginia "Association "; the visiting clergy were dined (and sometimes wined) from house to house, and were encouraged (and sometimes puffed up) by the praise of men. Such services were not without good effect on the established congregations, but they were not fulfilling the purpose for which Convocations were desired. No aggressive and sustained missionary operations were planned and undertaken, and the great majority of the clergy, content with the isola- tion of parochial life, were utterly indifferent to the movement.
After a sleep of two years an attempt was made to infuse life into the project. Convocations had been established by "resolution" of the Convention. In the diocese were some good men that attributed the failure of the Convocational system entirely to the manner in which it had originated. They had great faith in canons, and contended that if the system could base itself on a canon instead of a resolution it would be sure to succeed. It happened, however, that there also lived in the diocese some influential clergymen and laymen to whom the "Digest of Canons" was peculiarly sacred. In their eyes its sanctity would be desecrated by the settlement therein of any " Title," "Canon," "Section," or "Paragraph," that had not been tried and examined, in every bone, and nerve, and muscle, for at least two and preferably three or four consecutive Conventions. These were in suffi- cient force to prevent the proposed canon, " Of Convo-
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cations," from becoming a law immediately; and the Convention spent several years in discussing and amending the canon, and postponing consideration of it from each annual session to the next .* They were sublimely unmindful lof the inconsistency that they manifested in refusing to do with the right hand what they had already done with the left.
Finally, in 1873, the Convention adopted a canon that provided for the establishment of Convocations. Their number and their boundaries were left to the Bishop's determination; the Bishop also was to con- fer upon the presiding officer of each Convocation such ecclesiastical title-Dean, Archdeacon, or what not ?- as he saw fit; and every minister was to give four Sundays in the year to such missionary work within the Convocation as the presiding officer should assign-his expenses to be paid out of the missionary treasury.
Acting under the provisions of this canon, Bishop Wilmer, on May 20, 1873, set forth the four Convoca- tions of Huntsville, Tuskaloosa, Selma, and Mont- gomery, gave the title of "Dean " to their presiding officers, and appointed as Deans the Rev. Messrs. J. M. Banister, D. D., George H. Hunt, F. R. Hanson, and Horace Stringfellow, D. D. Two years later he called into being the Mobile Convocation-scarcely more than a clericus-and appointed the Rev. J. A. Massey, D. D., Dean. These first Deans were imbued
* In 1893 a special committee was appointed to revise the entire digest. At this writing (1898) it has not yet made its report.
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