BLACK GENIUS

Harrison Walker Ellis Remembers John Hannah Gray

by George M. Apperson

FROM AFRICA, Harrison W. Ellis, minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Monrovia, Liberia, wrote to William McLain of the First Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., on November 20, 1849. In the course of his long letter he inquired about John H. Gray of Memphis, Tennessee, and asked, “Please mention me to him, and tell me about him in, or through, whatever medium you may chose.”

EUTAW, ALABAMA, perhaps surprisingly, was the connection between Ellis and Gray, but they were now far separated in time and place, pursuing their ministerial callings with remarkable dedication.

Did Gray contact Ellis, or did Ellis write one of his eloquent letters to Gray? No information survives but the character of the men suggests that they must have communicated with each other. McLain, working with the American Colonization Society, was a warm friend to many of the emigrants to Liberia. Gray was also sensitive to the plight of African Americans and on arriving in Alabama in 1826, began a ministry to slaves that was continued after he left in 1836. Ellis and his wife joined the Presbyterian Church in Eutaw in the early 1840”s.

Born in Virginia, Ellis grew up in Tennessee where he began to teach himself to read when he was about nine. His interest was awakened by ministers who read the Bible and said that it was the Word of God, so he determined to search the Scriptures for himself. Charles A. Stillman, a distinguished Presbyterian educator, who befriended Ellis when he was pastor in Eutaw, described him as a “thorough African” who was gifted with a “powerful intellect and great force of character.”

Trained as a blacksmith, Ellis would fix scraps of old newspapers to the wall so he could learn his letters as he worked at the forge. Then he taught himself to write. Dr. Stillman recalled that, “he became a Christian and conceived a strong desire to read the Bible in the original languages. He applied himself to the study of Latin and then of Greek, and developed a wonderful talent for the acquisition of languages.” Borrowing books from anyone who would lend them, even asking questions of schoolboys who chanced by, he mastered the classical languages.

When he was about twentyfive, he was sold to a planter in Greene County, Alabama. His owner, Col. Robert Cresswell of Eutaw, was a joint partner with John Gray, and others, in the purchase of land soon after Gray came to Alabama. The group included Robert Quarrels, Gray’s brother-in-law, who laid out the town of Eutaw in 1838. Pride in their South Carolina origins prompted the emigrants to name the county Greene and the town Eutaw to recall the victory of General Nathaniel Greene at the Revolutionary battle of Eutaw Springs. Cresswell was not a church member but several of his slaves belonged to Gray’s congregation at Mesopotamia and then to the First Presbyterian Church in Eutaw when it replaced the earlier site in 1851.

Ellis was still a slave when his remarkable intellect began to be recognized. The publicity prompted the Synod of Alabama and Mississippi to raise funds to purchase him, his wife Celia, and their children, Jerry and Martha. Cresswell, who asked $2500.00 for the four, thought he might die before the sale was concluded, so he proposed adding a codicil to his will, giving the Synod possession of Ellis when the money was in hand. He then accepted the funds that had already been contributed.

Gray, in stark contrast to Ellis, was from a prosperous South Carolina family and a favorite pupil of Moses Waddel at his academy in Willington. Waddel’s students tended to have distinguished careers in politics, the church, and education. He prepared John C. Calhoun for Yale and William H. Crawford became secretary of the treasury and minister to France, while others were congressmen, Senators, governors, and judges. Waddel taught Gray from childhood and took him to the University of Georgia when he became president in 1819. He graduated with honors, studied theology, and came to Alabama. Married to a Charleston heiress, he built an elegant home shortly after he arrived at Mesopotamia.

Gray was a man of spiritual as well as intellectual attainments and began instructing slaves to become members in full communion with the church. He followed a policy laid down by the Presbyterian Church in 1787, that slaves ought to “be given such good education as to prepare them for the better enjoyment of freedom,” with a goal of bringing about “the final abolition of slavery in America.” This ministry to slaves in Eutaw was continued after Gray resigned in 1836. Ellis wrote in 1850, reflecting on his Alabama experience, “I hope to live, labor, and die in Africa . . . and my unadulterated friendship and gratitude to the white man of the South will endure, if possible, longer than this mortal life.”

The campaign for funds to buy Ellis raised the racial sensitivity of Alabama Presbyterians to a new level. “The special instruction of the colored population,” the Synod reported in 1844, “has received increased attention on the part of the ministry and of the members of the church. . . . Their case is remembered in fervent supplications to the throne of grace, around the family altar, in the social circles, and the public sanctuary.”

When Ellis was examined by the Synod in October 1846, it was an event reported in church newspapers from New Orleans to New York. Questioned by a professor from Columbia Theological Seminary, he was found to have a better knowledge of Hebrew that many of its graduates. Dr. Stillman modestly explained that he had not given Ellis more than twelve hours’ help when he was credited with tutoring him. John Dick’s Lectures on Theology, Timothy Dwight’s Theology: Explained and Defended in five volumes, and Thomas Boston’s Human Nature in its Four-Fold State were Calvinist theological writings with which Ellis was most familiar, but he had also read books on natural science and moral philosophy. A minister present wrote, “for sound, consistent, scriptural views of the leading doctrines of the gospel, few candidates for office have been known to equal him.”

A writer for a Washington, D.C. newspaper, in response to the Synod’s decision to send Ellis to Liberia, commented, “We regret that such a man should be sent out of the country; not that it is to be regretted that they will do good wherever they go, but because such men are more needed at home than abroad.”

John Gray undoubtedly would have agreed. He led in the organization of the Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis in 1844, and among the charter members was an African American slave!

Sources

The archives of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Montreat, N.C.

The African Repository.

Slaves No More, ed. By Bell I. Wiley, © The University Press of Kentucky.

With thanks to Wm. B. Bynum, Montreat, and Vernon Apperson, Austin, Texas

© G.M. Apperson, 2003.