Heritage Column for April 13, 2006
By Fred Anderson
This columnist prepared a biographical sketch of John Courtney for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, an ambitious publishing effort of the Library of Virginia. Obviously the project is still in its infancy since the compilers are only up to the third letter in the alphabet.
The entry on Courtney summarized the known facts and significant accomplishments of the early Virginia Baptist minister. He served as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Richmond from 1788 until his death in 1824. The dictionary entry could not contain all the colorful stories associated with a man so paternalistic and so revered that he was known among his people as “Father.”
It just wasn't fittin' to tell that from his pulpit in the city market in Shockoe Valley, he could shout loud enough to be heard in the nearby city jail, thereby providing “the first missionary work among prisoners ever conducted by Richmond Baptists.” It would not be fittin' because the good folks at First Baptist Church might not want it told that their spiritual ancestors worshipped in a hall just over smelly produce stands and within shoutin' distance of the jail.
It just wasn't fittin' to tell that his better judgment failed him when he marched up into the gallery of the church and dismissed a new fangled organization which was meeting there. It was called the Sunday school! Father Courtney ruled that they could not meet on the Lord's Day. The story reveals the pastor's slip as well as the Baptist tendency toward church splitting. In typical fashion, the Sunday school scholars left and organized the Second Baptist Church of Richmond.
It just wasn't fittin' to tell about his ornery ways. He compiled a hymnal; and when Father Courtney observed that the folks in the pews were more engrossed in the hymnal than in his sermon, he confiscated the hymnals.
But, fittin' or not, the story had to be told about his attitude toward those praying sisters of Richmond. In 1813 when Richmond Baptist women organized for a monthly missionary prayer meeting, some menfolks objected to women organizing. It has been passed down through the ages that Father Courtney settled the matter by saying: “I never heard of praying doing anybody any harm. For my part, the sisters may pray on.” The women of First Baptist Church, Richmond, have been praying and supporting missions ever since!
And it would have been fittin' to have told about Father Courtney's personal sacrifice and contribution to the struggle for religious liberty. Alas, the story came to this writer's attention the month after the final draft had been submitted. It is the stuff which historians enjoy. It is one of those mysterious stories which play hide and seek between myth and truth. It remains a mystery about Father Courtney.
The late Blanche Sydnor White wrote the definitive history of the First Baptist Church, which was published in 1955. In her retirement from the executive post at Virginia WMU, she came each day to the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, where she indexed the first 50 years of the Religious Herald, which was a mammoth undertaking in the days before computers. One day she came across an intriguing little article in a Herald of 1873.
The item was an inquiry sent to the editor from an exiled Virginian living in Tennessee. The man insisted that, some 56 years earlier, he had heard Father Courtney preach at the funeral of another minister, John Young of Amherst. The clincher is that in his funeral oration Courtney reminisced about the time when he and Young shared a jail cell for six months in Caroline County for preaching the gospel. The writer even remembered some of the words, recalling that despite the cold and heat of the jail, Courtney said, “I can say before my God today that I never felt too cold or too warm during the whole time of our imprisonment.”
About 40 Virginia Baptists were imprisoned or otherwise severely persecuted for their faith in the days of a state religion in Colonial Virginia. But when Miss White came across this item in her indexing in the 1960s, it was news. She made a note of it but added, “I don't vouch for it.” And when this historian recently found Miss White's reference to the item, it was news to him. However, one early sketch on Courtney hinted that “he joined himself to the persecuted.”
As for John Young, an early biographer from the 1850s tells that Young indeed was imprisoned in Caroline for six months. The same sketch tells that Young had requested that John Courtney preach his funeral sermon. The source for much of this information was Young's ministerial successor in Amherst, a man named William Duncan.
The writer of the little item hidden in the Herald of 1873 also was a Duncan-John B. Duncan. He stated that Young was a neighbor of his father in Amherst and that the two imprisoned ministers had agreed that whoever survived the other would preach his old comrade's funeral. The man who wrote the remembrance even recalled the sermon text: “Mark the perfect man and behold the upright” (Psalm 37:37). One more footnote about the funeral of John Young: the widow bought three gallons of whiskey for the funeral of the Baptist preacher of yore!
Does Father John Courtney deserve one more line in the biographies? Does he need to be listed among those who paid the price for freedom of conscience? Was he imprisoned? It is a mystery!
Fred Anderson may be contacted at P.O. Box 34, University of Richmond, VA 23173.