NOTE 5
(Chapter VII, page [185])
Attention may be called to two notable negro leaders of the early Nineteenth Century.
The Rev. William Douglass, the son of a blacksmith, born in Baltimore in 1805, made his way into the Methodist ministry. While at work on the Eastern Shore, he sought episcopal orders, and was ordained by Bishop Stone in St. Stephen’s, Cecil County. “In the evening,” wrote the Bishop, “the church was given up to the Colored People, and the Rev. Mr. Douglass preached to them an interesting sermon.” This was on June 22, 1834. The same year he was called to St. Thomas’ African Church, Philadelphia, which, since the death, in 1818, of its founder, the Rev. Absalom Jones, had been served by one and another of the white rectors of the city. On February 14, 1836, Mr. Douglass was advanced to the priesthood. Bishop Onderdonk who officiated, wrote, “Mr. Douglass is a man of color. I take the opportunity of recording my very high estimate of his highly respectable intellect and most amiable qualities which entirely relieved my mind, in his case, from the anxieties that I had long felt in regard to this department of episcopal duty. He ministers to a congregation entirely at unity in itself, much attached to him, and improving under his pastoral care in principles and duties of our common Christianity.”
Mr. Douglass became a leader of power among his race. Bishop Alonzo Potter, in announcing his death to the Convention of 1862, said, “It hath pleased the Lord to call away from the Church Militant the Rev. William Douglass, rector of St. Thomas’ African Church, in this city, where he has ministered for the last twenty-seven years—a man of great modesty, of ripe scholarship, and of much more than ordinary talents and prudence. He is, as far as I am informed, the only clergyman of unmixed African descent, who, in this country, has published work of considerable magnitude. In two volumes, one of sermons and one a history of St. Thomas’ Church, he has vindicated his right to appear among our respected divines. As a reader of the Liturgy he was unsurpassed.”
The Rev. Alexander Crummell, D.D., was born in New York in 1819. He was early baptized by the Rev. Peter Williams of St. Philip’s Church, under whom he was trained in the Church’s ways. In early manhood he applied for Orders. The General Theological Seminary declined to admit Negroes as students at that time, and Crummell was prepared for ordination in Boston. In 1842, he was ordained by Bishop Griswold. Dr. Clark, later Bishop of Rhode Island, was one of the examiners, and years afterwards the impression then strongly made was thus recorded: “I was appointed, with the late Rev. Dr. William Croswell, to examine young Crummell when he applied for deacon’s orders in the Diocese of Massachusetts; and I remember that Dr. Croswell afterwards remarked to me that no candidate for the ministry had ever passed through his hands who had given him more entire satisfaction.” After a brief year in Providence, R. I., Mr. Crummell answered the earnest call then coming from Liberia, and threw in his life with his colored brethren there. He was at once missionary, teacher, and the trainer of the theological students. Once he left Liberia for a stay in England, and returned with a Cambridge degree. After the Civil War, he returned to America, and, in Washington, founded St. Luke’s Church, whose corner-stone Bishop Pinckney laid in 1876. For more than twenty years he was its rector.
No man of the race in his day was more worthily esteemed, or more worthy of it, than Alexander Crummell, and none more truly an apostle of his Lord.