Slaveryto
freedom
Harrisburg on the eve
of Civil War
Study Areas
The Violent Decade
Pine Street Presbyterian Church
Third and Pine Streets, Harrisburg, PA
Harrisburg's English Presbyterian congregation acquired their own building in 1806, with the completion of a two-story brick church on the northeast corner of Second Street and Cherry Alley. That structure, the First Presbyterian Church, was rebuilt in 1842, but burned to the ground in a disastrous 1858 fire. The congregation moved to temporary quarters in (John H.) Brant's Hall, on Market Street, until a new church could be built.
Two churches came out of the fire, due to a serious split between Old School and New School theologies. While the New School congregants, under Reverend William Radcliffe DeWitt rebuilt at Second and Blackberry streets, forty-two Old School adherents purchased a lot on the northwest corner of Third and Pine Streets, directly across from Capitol Hill. Their new church, designed by architect Luther M. Simon and finished in 1860, was officially named The Presbyterian Church of Harrisburg, but over time it became known as the Pine Street Presbyterian Church.
Before the split, the Harrisburg Presbyterian congregation struggled mightily with the slavery issue. Nowhere was the conflict more evident than with its longtime pastor, Reverend William Radcliffe DeWitt. DeWitt received considerable criticism after the Civil War from pro-abolitionist adherents. From The Year of Jubilee, Men of God:
Hiram Rutherford was harshly critical of Reverend DeWitt’s refusal to take a stand against slaveholding, later accusing the beloved and long serving minister of lacking the courage to do so. In published correspondence to columnist William Henry Egle, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Rutherford wrote of DeWitt, “He was not a leader of men. Never was and never tried to be. The servant, the slave of his congregation—what it was, he was. Had it have been anti-slavery, he’d have been so, too. As it was, he wasn’t. By no chance did he ever make a new departure. True as the north star, in his Zionward march, he never failed to keep the middle of the road—the road of his congregation.” (4th ser., vol. 1, 100:324.)
Rutherford’s charges, though, do not reflect DeWitt’s personal struggle to come to terms with this moral division that so sharply divided his congregation. Through the 1850s, the pro-Southern, pro- slavery stance became less popular in Harrisburg, and more of DeWitt’s flock reexamined their views in light of the perceived abuses caused by the Fugitive Slave Law. On a personal level, Reverend DeWitt occasionally met with one of his most trusted congregants, Charles C. Rawn, to discuss slavery and related issues. It appears that, over time, DeWitt came to accept or at least tolerate the anti-slavery philosophy of the New School theology, as he stayed with the New School congregation when the Old School members of the congregation left in 1858 to form the Pine Street Presbyterian Church. Rawn, incidentally, stayed with the Old School Assembly, despite the views of the assembly that slavery could be tolerated by the church in the South as a necessary concession to preserve the Union. (p. 592-593)
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All photographs and text on this page copyright © 2010 George F. Nagle and Afrolumens Project.
Resources
- Egle, William Henry, Notes and Queries, 1879-1895
- Frew, Ken, Building Harrisburg, 2009
- Morgan, George H., Annals of Harrisburg, 1858.
Notes and Links
Of Interest Nearby