Shall The Meek Inherit The Earth?
Consider William Cochran Blair

by George M. Apperson

Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, negotiated by Thomas Jefferson, was the crucial move that set the Republic on its course toward becoming first among the nations. Vital concerns of the American people for the future were turned toward the West and away from the eastern seaboard and Europe. Unnumbered thousands became involved in securing the vast frontier as an integral part of our cultural heritage and civilization. The great and the small took part but most of them spent their lives in unrecorded roles with their names and contributions forever lost.

William Cochran Blair (1791-1873), belongs with the humble and obscure men and women who served in evangelizing and Americanizing this opening world without the depredation and exploitation that often characterized the winning of the West. Born in Kentucky, he attended Jefferson College after serving in the War of 1812. In 1821 he graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary where Archibald Alexander, its director, was one of the compelling exponents of missions in the history of the Presbyterian Church. Blair was ordained an evangelist by Chillicothe Presbytery, where anti-slavery ideals made it a center of abolitionist concerns. The Synod of South Carolina and Georgia sent him to the Chickasaw Nation. In the Synod, Moses Waddel, president of the University of Georgia and dedicated leader in the missions enterprise, was in touch with the Chillicothe movement,

Blair served three groups who needed his ministry; the Chickasaws, African slaves in Mississippi and finally, early emigrants to Texas. Details of his work have often been forgotten or gone unrecorded.

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PIGEON ROOST ROAD ran from Memphis, Tennessee, to the Chickasaw Nation, centered in present northwest Mississippi. It was used as a "wet weather trail," to reach the bluffs of the river where members of their nation had lived for centuries. Originating before the white man arrived, it connected villages west from their capital at Pon te tok [Pontotoc], crossing no streams prone to flooding, so it could be used continually throughout the year. Pigeon Roost Road was a name given by whites who settled on the Chickasaw bluffs since it was their route to Pacha Noosa [Pigeon Roost] and the lucrative trade with Native Americans. In retrospect, it became an open way that exposed Native Americans to destructive influences against which they had no defense. The name still appears on modern maps of Memphis and Collierville.

The Chickasaw mission was begun by Presbyterians who were concerned with evangelizing Native Americans. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, the General Assembly turned its attention to the Mississippi Territory and in 1800 directed James Hall and two other ministers to make a tour from Tennessee to the Chickasaw Nation. The Purchase of 1803 opened vast new areas and when the Panic of 1819 brought financial ruin to tens of thousands, the lure of emigration to the West was compelling.

By 1817 the Presbytery of South Carolina was asking for funds, "for sending forth missionaries to settlements destitute of the Gospel," as well as "The Aborigines of America [who] certainly have as fair claim upon our benevolence as any people under heaven," one presbyter reminded them.

The War Department controlled funds appropriated in 1819 by Congress to "civilize" the Indians, that is, to teach them to farm rather than to hunt. The Synod, in January 1821, began its mission to the Chickasaws who occupied vast areas in the Mississippi valley and were politically independent. Martyn, on Pigeon Roost Creek and two others, sixty and ninety miles east, were established and the Chickasaws used their grants to clear land, erect buildings and purchase stock. Blair and his wife came to Martyn in 1825, to a farm of about thirty acres of good land. A school was begun in 1826 with twenty-four pupils, several of whom lived with the Blairs. In the community, there were Chickasaws of mixed blood, African slaves, and a few whites, in addition to the Native Americans. Blair preached in English or with an African woman as translator. Slaves belonging to the Natives were often quite responsive to the evangelical appeal.

White emigrants on the Mississippi bluffs, forty miles from Martyn, were organized in 1819 as a municipality called Memphis. Here, Murdoch McMillan preached the first Presbyterian sermon in December, 1824. His wife had an interest in 5,000 acres of land patented earlier on the bluffs by her father. At Christmas of 1824, young Chickasaws came to Memphis to buy raw whiskey, and wildly drunk, performed "feats of horsemanship, the most daring and reckless I have ever witnessed," an American boy remembered. The negative influence of white migrants was tightening its grip on Native Americans. Obviously, speculation in land for profit and the unsophisticated Natives from whom it was taken, were invitations to exploitation. Few believed that Christianizing the Indians was the best way to introduce them to civilization.

An 1854 history of the Presbyterian Church in Memphis notes that Blair "obtained his supplies for the station at this place and made it convenient to be in Memphis on the Sabbath, and would preach for us at the time [1826] the population of the town consisted of two hundred souls." On 7 June 1828, he organized a church with four members, Littleton Henderson, whose business was primarily with the Indians, was the ruling elder. Blair's later interest in the temperance movement, closely connected with Presbyterian efforts in evangelism, may reflects more than an immediate concern for hard-drinking Texans.

Greed for Indian lands was a compelling force across the South, destroying hope for the future security of Native Americans. In Georgia, missionaries were arrested and imprisoned for preaching to the Cherokees. Missionaries reported that 1831 for the Chickasaws, "was a year of gloom, despondency and decline. Their government was prostrated, their hopes were crushed, they believed their ultimate removal to be inevitable.

They were unable to defend their country from the inroads of whiskey dealers, and intemperance came in like a flood." Laws of Mississippi imposed on them permitted unprincipled whites to "deluge the land with whiskey, and fill it with vice and woe." The missions were closing; Chickasaw territory was surveyed and sold as public land. They were forced to remove or remain on a fraction of their former domain, subject to the laws of the state. Blair, with no other course open, left and the property at Martyn was sold.

From this tragic experience, Blair took courage and began a ministry to slaves in Mississippi. After a brief stay in Louisiana, he served Africans on plantations around Natchez. Records of his work are scant and indefinite; Minutes of Mississippi and Amite Presbyteries are silent. However, Amite Presbytery's report to the General Assembly for 1836 places Blair at the African Church in Natchez, at Unity in Natchez in 1837, and in 1838, the newly created Louisiana Presbytery reported, "W. C. Blair, Colored Church, Natchez."

Organized at Natchez in 1838, Blair was moderator of the new Synod of Mississippi. Presbytery reports for 1839 and 1840 do not exist and in 1841, Blair's name disappears. However, a landmark controversy over slavery, by strong implication, emerges as the primary cause of his departure.

Natchez was a major slave market in the South, second only to New Orleans. In an area of great plantations and fertile soil, slaves and cotton were producing great wealth for their owners. An early arrival, James Smylie (1780-1853), established Presbyterian Churches and led in the organization of Mississippi Presbytery. He was an educator as well as a preacher, described as "An accurate Latin and Greek scholar, a profound theologian, and a thorough Calvinist." He is remembered today as an unflinching, uncompromising pro-slavery advocate in the face of rising abolitionist sentiment before the Civil War. Smylie became a man of wealth, owning large plantations and fifty three slaves in 1830.

As opposition to slavery became more vocal in the 1830's, Smylie began to ask, "Is slavery sinful?" He held that it was uncondemned in the Bible and therefore not sinful. His position was at odds with the Presbyterian General Assembly, the Methodists and the Episcopal bishops, but this did not deter him. To test opinion in Mississippi, he expounded his views in the Port Gibson Presbyterian Church, where it gave great offense to his brethren who advised him to desist. Defiantly, he continued to broadcast his views widely until the Presbytery of Chillicothe in Ohio wrote him in 1835, declaring every aspect of slavery a "heinous sin and scandal," a violation of Divine Law requiring church censure. William Blair, it should be remembered, was in Chillicothe Presbytery when it was organized and licensed by them to preach.

Smylie argued his views at length in a reply to the Chillicothe letter but his Presbytery refused to accept or publish it; he issued it himself in 1836.

Blair's reaction to his fellow presbyter may be judged from the records of Amite (later Louisiana) Presbytery, where he and Smylie were original members. Blair was preparing to leave Natchez by 1837 when the General Assembly's Board of Domestic Missions sent him to Texas for two months. Presbytery's Minutes do not record his request, but on the roll his name is inked through with the undated notation, "dismissed."

At the time, the Synod of Mississippi included all of Texas which became an independent Republic in 1836. The Presbyterian Church was in a period of internal stress with the Old School-New School controversy about to split it apart but the expansionist outlook inherited from the Colonial period was undiminished in the nineteenth century and the commission to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth was still its relevant mission. The Synod, in order to expedite its work in Texas, authorized four ministers to form the Presbytery of Brazos, which they did on 3 April 1840. Blair's failure to reach the meeting because of floods and the subsequent unsettled state of affairs in Texas prevented his signing the official document until December 1843, an indication of the odds against which he struggled during much of his ministry.

At the time Blair was exploring ways of finding a new calling in Texas, a fellow Kentuckian resigned his professorship at Princeton Seminary and became the administrator of the newly created Board of Foreign Missions. He was John Breckenridge who graduated a year later than Blair and his concept of the role the Presbyterian Church should play in the new republic base for expanding the missionary movement to the nations west and south of Texas. Breckenridge's father played a key role in legislation that brought about the Louisiana Purchase and Thomas Jefferson made him his Attorney General. Although he died when his son was young, the son had grown up in a tradition emphasizing the importance of the western frontier where the best prospects for expanding the American dream were to be found.

John Breckenridge, D. D.
The first agent of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign
Missions. He saw Texas as staging area for Presbyterian
Missions to Mexico, Latin America and West to the Pacific Ocean.

Manifest Destiny, a natural development in this new American vision, emerged as an article of political faith by the early 1830's, turning attention to southern and western frontiers and beyond. It shaped American foreign policy for sixty years and more. Texas was annexed in 1845, California and New Mexico, including Arizona, were ceded in 1848, predicting American expansion to the Pacific as inevitable. Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas, in an 1836 address in the Second Presbyterian Church of Louisville, Kentucky, identified the ideals of the Texas revolution with those those of our Founding Fathers, "Our cause is the cause of light and liberty, of religious toleration and pure religion."

Breckenridge urged Daniel Baker (1791-1857), who was becoming the South's most noted evangelist, to go to Texas. A New York newspaper reported that most of the clergymen coming to Texas were "uneducated and unintelligent" but Baker believed that evangelism and education were essential parts of his ministry. Arriving in 1840, he preached wherever he could find people, organizing churches, temperance societies and Sabbath Schools. A graduate of Hampden-Sydney College and Princeton Seminary, his most cherished project was the founding of Austin College, named to honor the Texas hero. Dr. Ernest Trice Thompson believed that "No Southern preacher, so far as is known, won more converts for the [Presbyterian] church," than Baker.

Blair's post in Texas was seen as an opportunity to plan for Presbyterian missionaries to be sent eventually into Mexico and Latin America by the Board of Foreign Missions. They wrote, "Although this mission is at present located in Texas, it is properly a mission to Mexico," and added, "As well may the attempt be made to stem the current of the Mississippi as to arrest in our hemisphere the progress of civil and religious liberty which already, by the independence of Texas, has reached the borders of Mexico."

William Blair, accepting his appointment as a foreign missionary in 1839, adopted the aims of Dr. Breckenridge. Already learning Spanish, he received a large number of Bibles and religious tracts to distribute to the Mexicans. Searching for a place to settle his family, he chose Victoria in the spring of 1840. He was aware that, "Although this mission for the present is located in Texas, it is properly a mission to Mexico." A ministry to the Anglo-Americans was to continue under the Board of Domestic Missions but he worked with them because they were citizens of a foreign nation, the Republic of Texas!

Blair established a school at Victoria in 1840 and in August, a band of marauding Comanche Indians descended on the village. Placing himself between his students and the hostile force he saw them safely to the stockade. His wife, at home with their day-old son, escaped unharmed, but fearing that their defenses might not hold, she was taken to a place of concealment, using a green cowhide as a stretcher. Other residents in the area were massacred, including two recent arrivals from Philadelphia at a local ranch. Their children were kidnapped but rescued by Texas Rangers, who placed them in Blair's custody. The eight year-old girl described him as a dear good man, kind as a father, "of medium height, well formed, possessed of an intellectually benign countenance and bright eyes." No portrait of Blair survives except this brief verbal sketch.

The Blairs had eight children and times were hard. Destitute, he started for Corpus Christie with his son, William, to beg for help from a friend from the States who had just landed. His son's pony stumbled on a mound and there, shining in the sunlight, were old Spanish gold coins worth some four hundred dollars. With no apparent owner, he considered it a gift from God in answer to his prayers. More than one miracle obviously preserved Blair and his family in treacherous and deadly circumstances through which they lived.

The lot given to the church in Victoria was claimed by the local Roman Catholic bishop, as having been granted to them under Mexican law. The suit consumed five years until finally the court decided in favor of the Presbyterians. However, a clear title was not obtained until 1873, when half of it was sold and a modest building erected on the site.

In 1852, Blair was chosen to head Aranama College at Goliad, established by Western Texas Presbytery, primarily to serve the Mexican population. When its charter was granted in 1854, it provided that it was open to students of all denominations, for moral and religious improvement. However its curriculum was purely literary and scientific. In 1857 it was offering a wide range of subjects, including English grammar, elementary and higher mathematics, Latin and Greek, as well as bookkeeping, and surveying. It struggled with finances but remained open until the Civil War when the entire student body joined the Confederate army. All attempts to revive it after the war failed and the Presbytery no longer claimed the property.

Blair was virtually a refugee for three years during the war and a home he had build for himself on Green Lake was destroyed. He retired to Port Lavaca and was rarely able to preach because of a series of strokes. When he died in February 1873, all the trumpets may have sounded on the other side but he was buried in an obscure grave until some kindly ladies discovered it and provided a fitting stone.

Blair left no imposing edifice behind him nor an enduring appreciation of his career in the church, but one might apply the Latin epitaph chosen by Sir Christopher Wren, to Blair, which translates, "If you ask to see his monument, look around you!"

With thanks to Vernon Apperson of Austin for researching Texas archives.

SOURCES

Minutes of the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church USA.

A History of American Missions to the Heathen from Their Commencement to the Present Time (Worcester, MA, 1840.)

History of all the Churches in Memphis Presbytery (c. 1854), manuscript PHS Philadelphia.

Records of Amite Presbytery, Vol. 1, 1835, Louisiana Presbytery after 1837, manuscript, PHS Montreat.

Extracts from the Records of Mississippi Presbytery (Jackson, MS, 1880.)

James Smylie, A Review of A Letter from the Presbytery of Chillicothe (and) The Chillicothe Letter to the Presbytery of Mississippi (Woodville, MS, 1836.)

Letter of Gerrit Smith to the Rev. James Smylie of the State of Mississippi (NY, 1837.)

Randy J. Sparks, Apostle of Slavery, James Smylie and the Biblical Defense of Slavery (Journal of Mississippi History, vol. 51, No. 2, May 1989.)

Albert E. Casey, et al, Amite County, Mississippi, vol. 2, The Churches, 1699-1865 (Birmingham, AL, 1950.)

William Stuart Red, A History of the Presbyterian Church in Texas (Austin, 1936.) The Handbook of Texas Online (The Texas State Historical Association, Austin, 1997-2002.)