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.
