Loren B. Mead (1930-2018) was a prominent Episcopal priest and prolific author and a native of Florence, South Carolina.J. Michael Martinez is the author or editor of 20 books on American history and law including the Rowman & Littlefield titles A Long Dark Night: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II (2016), Terrorist Attacks on American Soil: From the Civil War Era to the Present (2012), Coming for to Carry Me Home: Race in America from Abolitionism to Jim Crow (2011), and Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux, Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire during Reconstruction (2007). He teaches political science at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

• List of FiguresPreface and Acknowledgements (J. Michael Martinez)Foreword (Walter Russell Mead)Part I—The Antebellum Era and the War of 1861-18651. “The Rich and the Poor in the House of God Meet Together”—Three Clergymen and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Civil War Era: An Overview2. “He Was Always Entertained at the Various Plantations and Was Always Welcomed Most Warmly”—Peter Fayssoux Stevens: The Early Years (1830-1865)3. “I Think I Was Born Opposed to Slavery”—Anthony Toomer Porter: The Early Years (1828-1865)4. “I Redevoted Myself Wholly and Only to God”—William Porcher DuBose: The Early Years (1836-1865)Part II—Reconstruction and Redemption5. “A World So Changed from What It Had Been Ten Years Before”—South Carolina Politics During Reconstruction (1865-1877)6. “Shall the Church of God Catch the Evil Infection?”—The Postwar Episcopal Church in the South Carolina Diocese7. “Of Bishop Stevens It May Be Well Said: ‘Servant of God, Well Done!’”—Peter Fayssoux Stevens: The Later Years (1865-1910) 8. “He was a True Evangelist”—Anthony Toomer Porter: The Later Years (1865-1902)9. “The Only Important Creative Theologian That the Episcopal Church in the United States Has Produced”—William Porter DuBose: The Later Years (1865-1918)Part III—Conclusion10. “We Have Passed Through a Season of Extraordinary Trial”—Divergent Views on Race in the Lives of Stevens, Porter, and DuBose ReferencesAbout the Authors

The late Rev. Loren B. Mead and the historian J. Michael Martinez have given us an invaluable composite biography of three white Episcopal priests from South Carolina who, after their faithful service to the Confederate military and ordination in the Protestant Episcopal Church, followed distinctly different paths in their post-emancipation responses to the new racial order and the ways and means of white supremacy. Looking from afar, we might expect three sons of the ruling class to share a rigorous fealty to anti-Black positions in the tumultuous era of Reconstruction in South Carolina. However, as the authors’ careful portraiture reveals, the priests—Peter Fayssoux Stevens, Anthony Toomer Porter, and William Porcher DuBose—varied in religious temperament and commitment to the pastoral mission of the Episcopal Church, which in turn led to important differences in their thoughts and actions regarding freed people’s place in the post-war ecclesial and social order. Even if none challenged the most basic expectations of white racial supremacy, only DuBose held strong to an anti-Black vision of the Church. The more grounded ministries of Stevens and Porter, in varying degrees, either sought room in the Church for Black South Carolinians or endeavored to uplift freed people through education. Each biography of an understudied figure is valuable in itself, but the inspired decision to bind them into one book yields the important insight that, even among white conservatives and in the most conservative of white Southern churches, the emerging racial order of the New South was not foreordained and did not go unchallenged.