CHAPTER VI.

PASTOR OF THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AT

SAVANNAH.

(November, 1841-January, 1843.)

LICENTIATE PALMER TRIES HIS GIFTS.-IS CALLED TO THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SAVANNAH, GA.-MARRIES MISS MCCONNELL.-CARRIES HER IN A BUGGY FROM COLUMBIA TO SAVANNAH.— THE BEGINNING OF THEIR HOME-MAKING. HE HAD IN SAVANNAH A FINE CHURCH FOR A YOUNG MAN OF HIS PARTS.-WAS ORDAINED AND INSTALLED PASTOR, MARCH 6, 1842.-THREW HIMSELF ZEALOUSLY INTO HIS WORK.-PREPARED HIS SERMONS IN A MOST LABORIOUS WAY.-WAS FORCED TO CHANGE HIS METHODS OF PREPARATION AND DELIVERY.-CONSEQUENT BROADER WORK AS A STUDENT. DID VIGOROUS PASTORAL WORK.-EVINCED DETERMINATION IN DEALING WITH HIS PEOPLE.-DID OUTSIDE WORK.-HIS CHURCHES PROSPERED UNDER HIS PASTORATE. HE WAS CALLED TO THE PASTORATE OF THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF COLUMBIA

MR.

BENJAMIN M. PALMER was not one of those candidates who wait for a "suitable place" in which to exercisce their gifts. Having been offered temporary work in Anderson, the county seat of that county in which, a few months. before, he had sought subscribers for the Temperance Advocate and made temperance addresses and delivered Christian lectures, he repaired to the field as early as the midsummer following the completion of his seminary course. It gave him a place to work and to do the best that was in him under the circumstances; and if the Lord had a more important work for him to do he would be able to find him in his own way and at the right time in the little town of Anderson.

The Rev. R. H. Reid gives us a glimpse of Mr. Palmer's work in Anderson. He says:

"After his licensure, he supplied the church in Anderson for a short while. I was a pupil of Wesley Leverett's famous classical school in that place. There was a protracted meeting in the church conducted by Mr. Palmer. A goodly number confessed Christ and united with the church. I was among the number."

We have proof in these words that he did an important work

in Anderson. Its importance will appear more fully in the sequel.

He was allowed to remain there only three months. As early as October 1, 1841, overtures were made him to become the pastor of the First Church of Savannah, Ga. As Savannah was in a different Presbytery from that to which he belonged, some time was consumed before the call could be formally placed in his hands.

Meanwhile, assured of a modest living for himself and a wife, he returned to Columbia, waited on Dr. Howe, informed him that he and Miss Augusta McConnell proposed an early marriage, but did not know whether they could plan to have it in her mother's home or not. He had come, he said, to Dr. Howe to learn. Good Dr. Howe was a wise man as well as a good one. He had already seen that opposition was useless, and, indeed, he was not certain that the match was so altogether poor after all. Palmer was poor but of vast promise. Dr. Howe assured him most kindly that the marriage could take place nowhere else than in his own home. So the young people were married October 7, 1841; and by the Rev. Professor George Howe.

A few days after the wedding, they made their journey across the country to Savannah in a buggy, presented to them by Dr. Howe as a wedding gift. The trousseaux of the bride and groom and the library with which he was to begin his work in Savannah were all packed into one small trunk, which was strapped on the hinder part of the buggy. He had ten dollars in his pocket. Their leaving Columbia had in it both bitter and sweet. To the lithe, swarth, determined, talented young man it meant less of bitter, though sentiment drew him back to his last and best-beloved Alma Mater. To the young girl-bride, it meant more of the bitter. She was parting for the first time from the mother. As they drove the first morning the tears flowed so freely from the young wife's eyes that the husband was disturbed. After a time he felt constrained to say that, if the trial was so great, they had better return to Columbia, and he go on alone to Savannah This startling proposal was just the thing needed to tone up the wifely feeling. That plan looked more dreadful than leaving the mother. Pretty soon smiles chased the tears away.

Well attested tradition says that the pair really enjoyed that trip in the beautiful October weather, through the ever varying

vistas of October foliage. It was not yet the age of the Pullman palace car and the Saratoga. It was not even the age of long railways. There was absolutely nothing of the kind between Savannah and Columbia. They did not feel the need of it. He was twenty-three, she was three or four years younger. They were not poor. God had richly endowed them with health and strength, and genius, and energy and character. They went to a sufficient, if modest, living; to a position of honor and esteem which God would enable them to fill. So on over the country roads toward Savannah they drove, close to nature, sympathizing with it, a part of it, close to each other, conscious also of being the children of God. They reached the city safely.

For several months during the first part of the period in Savannah, they boarded in the family of Mr. Joseph Cummings, one of the elders of his church. Then, in view of the expected advent of an important addition to the family, they rented a little cottage, and set up housekeeping in it. It is safe to say that the housekeeping was good, perhaps excellent, from the start. Mrs. Howe had been a housekeeper whose ideal it was to make a home where her husband and children and the passing stranger could find health and comfort flowing daily as from a living well, and in which her husband could do his work unhindered. Mrs. Palmer was afterwards able to do the same sort of housekeeping, and perhaps was thus competent from the start. She possessed one great advantage, however, over the young wives who go to housekeeping to-day; they took with them to that little cottage "Caroline," a young slave woman, who had grown up in the house of Mrs. Palmer's mother. She was about the same age as Mrs. Palmer herself. She became at once their maid of all work. She must have been of capital stuff. She remained with them a faithful and efficient servant not only while negro slavery lasted, but till her mistress had died in 1888, and then continued to live in the broken household till her own death six years later.

Into this little home came to bless it, and through it, thousands of other homes, a little child. He came July 26, 1842, a little hazel-eyed stranger with the imprint of the father strongly upon him. The father has given the following account of the child's arrival and of the emotions with which he was received:

"The morning was opening its eye in the first gray streak upon the horizon, when a faint cry issued from an upper chamber in one of our Southern cities. Instantly the hurried steps were arrested of one pacing uneasily to and fro in the hall beneath. It was a cry which, when once heard, is never forgotten; the low, flat wail of a babe just entering a world to which it is a stranger-the symbol of pain, premonitory of all it must suffer between the cradle and the grave. It fell now, for the first time, upon ears which had ached through the weary night to catch the sound. The long suspense was over; and the deep sympathy which had taken up into the soul the anguish that another felt in the body, gave place to exultation when the great peril was passed. The young father bowed himself on the spot where he stood, and poured out an overcharged heart in grateful praise to Him who had softened the curse to 'woman,' who, 'being deceived was in the trangression,' by the gracious 'Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.'

"Solemn thoughts crowded together in the first parental consciousness; thoughts that deepened in significance afterwards but never are so startling as when they rush upon the soul in the first experience of the new relation. Shall they be embalmed in speech? Thousands in the rehearsal will recall the earliest flush of these emotions.

"Little miniature of myself-bone and flesh of my own substanceto whom I stand, as the instrumental cause of thy being, a secondary creator!' claiming by equal right the ancestral name, and wresting it from me when I am low in death! Soon to be strong and tall as Icoming each day more into the foreground and pushing me nearer to the edge over which I must topple at the last! Sole occupant then of all my trusts, the mysterious link that binds me to the generations that follow, in whom all my earthly immortality resides; and passing me on as but a figure in the continuous succession! And yet, in all this formidable rivalry, I clasp this first born to my heart and with not the least infusion of jealousy.

"Little stranger, comest thou to solve or to darken the mystery of marriage? Even at the fountain the stream was parted in two heads in the dualism of sex. Great enigma of nature, lying just at the beginning: man's unity broken by the separateness of woman-yet preserved in her derivation from his side, ideally existing still in him from whom she was taken. The complementary parts are reintegrated into the whole by a mystical union which blends the two spiritually into one. And now the joint life issues in a birth, the child gathers into itself the double being from which it sprung, and diversity returns to the unity whence it emerged. Strange reconciliation of Nature's contradictions this third, in whom the one and the two are brought together

again. Tiny infant as thou art, thou dost yet interpret the symbol of marriage to those who produced thee.

"An immortal soul, with dormant powers that by and by will compass the universe; now soaring to the copestone of heaven, and measuring the stars; now turning the stone-leaves which beneath the earth record the histories of countless cycles. A soul which will at last strip off the encumbrance of clay, and sweep with exploring wing the vast eternity where God makes His dwelling place and I must stoop beneath this wing and teach its first flight, that will rise higher and higher in the far forever.'

"A soul, alas, born under the curse of sin, through me the guilty channel. And I must stand in the holy priesthood appointed of God, between it and eternal death. My soul must be in its soul's stead, and feel for it the Law's penal frown. My faith must lay her hand upon the covenant, 'I will be a God to thee and to thy seed after thee;' and plead the force of that great instrument with all the agony of human intercession." 1

The child was called for the father and for his maternal uncle, who as a young lad had perished in the Connecticut River, Benjamin Blakeley. The only son ever born to them, he was not to pass beyond the pale of infancy in this life. But how rich God made them in him for the time! And how important that he who was to deal with the joys and sorrows, the privileges, duties and responsibilities of parenthood, in so influential a way, should have practical experience of the relation himself. We shall see them mourning around the little one's bier in less than two years; but who shall say that his coming was not fraught with consequences sufficient to compensate for all the sorrow?

The First Presbyterian Church of Savannah had been organized in the summer of 1827, of persons who had withdrawn from the Independent Presbyterian Church of that city, fourteen in number. Amongst these had been Lowell Mason, the great composer of sacred music. In organizing, the church had elected Messrs. Lowell Mason, Joseph Cumming and G. G. Faries as elders. The Rev. John Boggs had become stated supply of the church early in 1828, and pastor November 30, 1828, to December 1, 1829. For nearly two years ensuing the church had been without a regular pastor, depending on temporary supplies. In 1831, Rev. Charles Colcock Jones had begun his ministry. After a year and a half of service as pastor,

1 See the Broken Home, pp. 5 to 8.