James Osgood Andrew

American Bishop

James Osgood Andrew (May 3, 1794 – March 2, 1871) was elected in 1832 an American bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church. After the split within the church in 1844, he continued as a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

Andrew was born on May 3, 1794, in the township of Washington in Wilkes County, Georgia, a son of the Rev. John and Mary Cosby Andrew. Rev. John Andrew was the first native Georgian to enter the Methodist ministry.

James Andrew was licensed to preach in 1812 in Eliam Methodist Episcopal Church in the South Carolina Annual Conference of the M. E. Church. In 1814 was ordained a deacon and was admitted to the ministry in 1816. The first twenty years of his ministry included appointments to the Salt Ketcher Circuit in South Carolina, the Bladen Circuit in North Carolina, and the Augusta and Savannah circuits in Georgia. In 1829 Andrew was appointed Presiding Elder of the Edisto District, which included Charleston, South Carolina. In the 1840s, the bishop's ownership of enslaved people generated controversy within the Methodist Episcopal Church, as the national organization had long opposed slavery. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, had been appalled by slavery. The church considered slavery to be "evil." Methodist preachers and church members were expected to take action to end the institution of slavery in America. Bishop Andrew was criticized by the 1844 General Convention and suspended from office until such time as he should end his "connection with slavery." Southern members disputed the Convention's authority to discipline the bishop or to require slave owning clergy to emancipate the people whom they considered as property. Andrew became the symbol of the slavery issue for the Methodist Episcopal Church. But the details surrounding his ownership of enslaved people, and how he acquired them, have been debated. Andrew's defense at the 1844 General Convention In 1816, Andrew married Ann Amelia MacFarlane, with whom he had six children. Upon her death in 1842, she bequeathed him an enslaved person. Andrew's second wife, Leonora Greenwood, whom he married in 1844, was also an owner of enslaved people. When she died in 1854, he married Emily Sims Childers. The oft repeated assertion that Andrew only came into slave ownership by way of marriage or inheritance was reinforced by George G. Smith in his 1882 biography of Andrew. The Newton County, GA Property Tax Digests for 1848 show that James O. Andrew was assessed for 27 enslaved people, and for 21 people in 1849. The 1850 US Census Schedule of Slave Inhabitants in the State of Georgia and the 1851 tax records of Newton County document James O. Andrew as the "Slave Owner" of 24 enslaved men, women and children from age 2 to age 65. The fluctuations in enumeration of the people held in enslavement by Andrew could be explained by births and deaths among the enslaved, the exchange of enslaved people, or by the buying and selling of enslaved people. The accurate count of enslaved people was important for government purposes. The Census count of "Slave Inhabitants" under the Three fifths Compromise was a factor in determining the number of seats states with enslaved populations had in the U. S. House of Representatives and in the Electoral College. The counting and valuation of enslaved people in tax digests was a factor in determining the amount of taxes to be paid by slave owners to local governments. In 1924, John Donald Wade wrote that Bishop Andrew's case at the 1844 General Convention had concerned an enslaved boy named Jacob and an enslaved girl named Kitty. The story was related in Wade's biography of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, a prominent defender of the institution of slavery who had himself owned dozens of enslaved people. This tale claims the enslaved Kitty was so well treated that she declined Bishop Andrew's offer of freedom, a claim typical of the Confederate "Lost Cause" mythology. A memorial tablet for Kitty Andrew Shell placed in the Oxford City Cemetery in 1938 by H. Y. McCord relates this tale. (Locals call it "Kitty's Stone.") The stone tablet states, "Kitty was a slave girl bequeathed to James O. Andrew by Mrs. Powers of Augusta, Georgia in her will when Kitty was 12 years of age with the stipulation that when she was 19 years of age, Kitty was to be given her freedom and sent to Liberia," which had been established by the American Colonization Society as a colony for free blacks. When Kitty was 19, Bishop Andrew had Dr. A. B. Longstreet, who was then President of Emory College, and Professor George W. Lane interview her about her wishes. Kitty declined to go to Liberia, saying, "I don't want to go to that country. I know nobody there. It is a long ways, and I might die before I get there." While Kitty was allowed many personal freedoms, she remained enslaved by Bishop Andrew until her death at the age of perhaps twenty nine, in 1851. Although under the laws of Georgia at that time, Bishop Andrew could have freed Kitty and sent her to a free state, he did not do so. Instead, he built a cottage for her in his backyard where she lived and worked for his family. As no legal marriage could be contracted by enslaved peoples under civil law, Kitty was allowed to live in a "marriage arrangement" with her enslaved husband Nathan Boyd, and the couple had three children. Another version of Kitty's story sees her as possibly the daughter of James O. Andrew by another enslaved woman, or perhaps even his coerced mistress. M. E. church legislation was that clergy should not enslave people, no matter how acquired. The abolitionist movement was evident within Methodism from its very foundation. Missionaries in the South had at first encouraged slaveholders to free any people they enslaved. But as the economic viability of slavery expanded in the South, adherence to those foundational tenets waned. In 1808, the General Conference granted that the regional conferences could craft their own guidelines on slavery. Allowing the conferences to make accommodations for slavery essentially reversed the anti slavery heritage of the church, at least in the South. By the 1840s, Andrew, Longstreet and other southern Methodist leaders argued that accommodations for slavery fit within the Christian tradition, and positioned the church to influence southern planters for paternal protection and improved treatment of enslaved people. At the 1844 General Conference some delegates thought the larger issue was whether the M. E. Church would rule on the acceptability of slavery. But strongly abolitionist Northern delegates sponsored a resolution asking Bishop Andrew to "desist" from exercising the Episcopal office so long as he continued to enslave people. Although Southern delegates countered that the Church would be destroyed in the many southern states that prohibited emancipation, the resolution passed by a vote of 110 to 69. This censure of Bishop Andrew was intolerable to the southern dissidents who within days proposed a Plan of Separation between northern and southern Methodists. The next year representatives of the Southern Annual Conferences met in Louisville, Kentucky, to organize their own denomination. The first General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South met in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1846, and Andrew was invited to preside.

Bishop Andrew presided as the Senior Bishop of his denomination from 1846 until his death. He led the Southern ministers of the church in dividing from the main church over the issue of slavery in 1846, and became the first bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. During the American Civil War (1861–65), he resided in Summerfield, Alabama. Andrew was a founding trustee of Central University, a Methodist university, in 1858. It was renamed Vanderbilt University in 1872. He was buried in Oxford. Andrew College in Cuthbert, Georgia, is named for him.

Family Government, 1846. Miscellanies, 1854. He also contributed to religious periodicals.

Smith, George G., The Life and Letters of James Osgood Andrew, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Nashville, Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1882.