Racial Justice Statement

We face our history

Davidson County Will Book 13, Page 153 includes an inventory (above) for the estate of Catharine R. Lapsley, the wife of the Rev. Robert A. Lapsley, the first minister of Second Presbyterian Church. Seven enslaved people are recorded in this document as her property.

Courtesy of the Metro Nashville Archives

As one could expect of a white-controlled congregation born in the slave South, slavery and race were part of Second Presbyterian’s DNA from its outset.

Second was first conceived in 1841 as a Sunday School launched by some “young and enthusiastic” members of what was then the Nashville Presbyterian Church, which stood on the site that is now Downtown Presbyterian Church. The leaders in this effort were prominent merchants, most of them slaveholders.

The Sunday School was elevated to a congregation of the Nashville Presbytery in 1843, with 36 charter members, building its first sanctuary on the corner of Gay and College, on a lot donated by hardware merchant and slaveholder James Erwin. The first Session was likewise dominated by slaveholders, one of whom held with his wife 21 slaves.

Second’s first minister, Robert A. Lapsley, was also a slaveholder. Prior to the Civil War, it was not uncommon for white-controlled churches to have enslaved members, but there is no evidence of that for Second. However, the original sanctuary included a gallery, at a time when it was customary in southern churches to reserve the gallery for slaves.

Slavery was also central to a defining event of Second’s Civil-War-era history. At the. time of Tennessee’s secession in 1861, Second’s pastor, J. S. Hays, was northern-born. Hays was no opponent of slavery himself; indeed he was strongly opposed to abolitionism and the Republican Party. But he was also opposed to secession, and in any case was reluctant to address political issues from the pulpit. That stance put him afoul of most of his Session (all slaveholders), which expected him to pray for Confederate victory, and demanded he step down.

The congregation split over the demand; while Hays bowed to the demand, the split continued, such that on the eve of the Union occupation of Nashville in February 1862, a prayer meeting saw each half of the congregation refusing to pray for the other side. Once the occupation was in place, the pro-Union dissidents, led by two northern-born merchants (one a slaveholder), convinced the occupation authorities to seize the books, records, communion plate, and building from the pro-Confederate majority of the Session. The building was then used as a chapel for Union soldiers, and Second became part of the northern (Old School) Presbyterian church, as did what remained of the Presbytery of Nashville.

The northern church sought to reestablish its presence in the South, using Second and the northern-affiliated Presbytery as a beachhead, but the effort proved a failure; in 1870 the Presbytery held only two churches, Second and a Black congregation in Columbia, and Second had only 102 members. Second was returned to the control of the southern church in 1871.

Neither side appears to have been motivated by opposition to slavery, although the two Unionist leaders, Daniel D. Dickey and Hezekiah Scovel, entered Republican politics after the war, and the efforts of the northern church to use Second in its attempt to penetrate the South immediately after the war suggest that the congregation may have been briefly “progressive” by southern white standards before its reversion to southern control.

Treasurer’s records from the 1860s indicate that the congregation included leading Republicans, including the “carpetbagger” Mayor A. E. Agnew; the editor of the principal Republican newspaper S. C. Mercer; General John Eaton, who had worked with “contrabands” under Ulysses Grant and then became State Superintendent of Education under Republican William G. Brownlow; and other Republican office holders and prominent local unionists.

Second’s pastor from 1864 to 1867, R. H. Allen, later became a prominent advocate for missions to the freedmen in the northern church, although there is no evidence of such interest during his pastorate in Nashville. His successor, W. W. Campbell, had ties to the early Fisk University, helping found a union church for the students; Fisk briefly rented a pew at Second, though one suspects mainly to accommodate white faculty. Campbell also preached at the funeral of Joseph McKee, a pioneer founder of freedmen’s schools in Nashville who was attached to a different presbyterian denomination, the United Presbyterian Church.

All told, though, Second’s unionism was less interested in helping the freedmen than in opposing sectional division; after 1871 there is little evidence to indicate that Second deviated from White southern orthodoxy on racial issues prior to the past half century.

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, under the leadership of Pastor Joseph Holder, some members, including youth, sought to reach out to people of color living nearby in the then transitional neighborhood of Waverly-Belmont, inviting them to attend Second and participate in its youth group. Blacks proved uninterested in attending Second, though; furthermore, those efforts proved controversial among white members and were soon abandoned. An initiative of Pastor Thomas Borland in the 1980s to exchange pulpits with an African-American congregation likewise faded with time.

Although today’s congregation welcomes people of all races, prides itself on being open to the cultural and theological riches of the African-American Christian tradition, and engages in interracial cooperation on matters of community concern, it remains substantially White.