Harrison Walker Ellis Remembers John Hannah Gray | The Voice, April 2003 | Synod of Living Waters
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Volume 14 No. 2
Contents
April 2003
BLACK GENIUS
Harrison Walker Ellis Remembers John Hannah Gray
by George M. Apperson
Harrison Walker Ellis
John Hannah Gray
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.
 
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