[ECUSA] Charleston parish plays key role in burial of Confederate submarine crew

Thousands of visitors from around the world crowded historic Charleston, South Carolina, for the colorful and much-anticipated burial April 17 of the crew of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley, which vanished in 1864 after sinking a Union ship blockading that city’s harbor.

“We want to give these men the burial that fate denied them,” declared Friends of the Hunley Commission chairman Glenn McConnell, speaking to the massed troops and thousands of onlookers at the cemetery.

McConnell, president pro tem of the South Carolina State Senate, is a parishioner at Charleston’s Church of the Holy Communion. And it is perhaps for this reason that it was Holy Communion, rather than the larger and better-known historic downtown Episcopal parishes of St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s, that became most involved in Hunley-related events.

Planners of the event labored intently to maintain the dignity of the week-long schedule of lectures, concerts, exhibits, and religious services that culminated in the Saturday burial. The crew lay in state on the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Yorktown and in four churches in the city.

Holy Communion, an Anglo-Catholic style parish with a vibrant urban outreach program in the racially mixed west side of downtown Charleston, was where the eight coffins of the Hunley crew lay in state all day on Friday. Lined up in the crossing of the church, each coffin was draped with the ensign of the Confederate Navy. Throughout the day, an honor guard of re-enactors, who stood at attention in the sanctuary, was changed every 15 minutes.

“There was a steady stream of people passing through to view the coffins, from the time we opened the doors at 9 a.m. until we closed at five o’clock. The South Carolina Highway Patrol told me that they estimated the numbers had reached 3,000 by two in the afternoon,” said the Rev. M. Dow Sanderson, rector of Holy Communion. He said that by 5 p.m. the estimate of visitors was close to 5,000.

The doors were shut and then re-opened two hours later for a solemn requiem mass, attended by 500 persons. Another one hundred people were turned away after all the seats were filled inside. Sanderson preached a homily for the service, which was attended by many who were visitors to the city and not familiar with the liturgy of the church, or its music, processions, acolytes, and billowing incense.

Eventually, the sonorous dirges of the choir’s Missa pro Defunctis transported one portly young trooper into dreamland, and he slumped slightly forward, his chin upon his chest. Two bonnet and homespun-dress-clad young Rebel ladies, unable to endure a more extended dose of Anglo-Catholicism, crept off the rear pews frowning and mumbling out the back door when the Communion of the Faithful had hardly gotten underway. “I guess this was ‘shock and awe’ for the Baptists,” noted one parishioner, as he watched them slip away.

Others, including a group of women from a Church of Christ congregation in rural South Carolina, echoed his sentiments, expressing their satisfaction with the respectful and reverent tone of the liturgy. Sanderson, who also read the Committal service Saturday at the graveside, said he thought his church’s involvement in the burial was entirely appropriate. He said that Senator McConnell approached him more than two years ago about hosting the current funeral at Holy Communion. “We were willing to do it, very happy to do it, and I think that all of us have been rather overwhelmed by the numbers of people who have come. When I got here this morning at six o’clock there were already people in the parking lot.”

The Rev. William Willoughby III, rector of the Parish of Saint Paul the Apostle in Savannah, said that he had come because a parishioner of his, Jamie Downs, had done much of the forensic work on the human remains. “All we need is the Flying Wallendas,” intoned Willoughby, who thought that the week had become too much of a circus. “But sometimes, also, the political correctness gets too crazy, and I say that as one who is both a political liberal and a liberal Catholic,” he added.

Henry Kidd of Colonial Heights, Virginia, a tall, erect man with curled mustache who was clad in a Confederate officer’s uniform with white gloves, sat attentively on a back pew near a cluster of blue and white-garbed North Carolina re-enactor soldiers and women dressed in period clothing. “I came from Virginia to say good-bye to these men, and I appreciate the great dignity that Holy Communion provided for this service,” Kidd commented. Virginia Division Commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Kidd created a design for a medal of honor, actually authorized during the Civil War by the Confederate government but never struck, which was on display in the narthex of the church. Eight of the medals rested on eight purple satin pillows. They were later carried in the funeral procession and presented to descendants of the crew and representatives of their families at the cemetery.

“A few people have tried to create a sense of protest,” said Sanderson, in response to a question, “but there really has been none. A friend of mine is the Rev. Joe Darby, an AME pastor here in town who is the vice-president of the state chapter of the NAACP. Someone asked him if there was to be a protest, and he said, ‘No. We don’t protest funerals.’ So there’s just not a willingness to play that game.”

Sanderson pointed out that Holy Communion in February hosted the annual memorial mass for the last children sold into slavery in Charleston. He said Walter Rhett, the organizer of that event, and a member of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, had commented to the press that it was appropriate that the same parish would also be later on burying the Hunley crew.

"There are parallel issues,” said Sanderson. “The African-American community wants to remember. People who celebrate their heritage, all of these re-enactors, want to remember. But I don’t think anyone wants to remember and stay entrenched. They want to remember as a lesson learned, ways that God has healed. No one wants to go back to those oppressive days. We give thanks to God that that’s put behind us. All the while we realize that injustice is still part of our everyday lives. There’s still much, much work to do. But, goodness, how far we’ve come.”

During the war, the dioceses of the Southern states left the national church and formed the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America. The organization continued to exist after the war was over, and it actually held a General Convention in the fall of 1865. Within a few years all the Southern dioceses rejoined the national church, but some scholars maintain that the Confederate Episcopal Church was never officially dissolved.

Sanderson said that Holy Communion’s first rector, Anthony Toomer Porter, who had been a chaplain in the Confederate Army, after the war started a school for black children in Charleston. When he visited the North to raise money for the school, he addressed a hostile congregation at Grace Church in Brooklyn by announcing from the pulpit, “I am Joseph, your brother.” Hearts were melted, the money was raised, the school was built.

The Church of the Holy Communion has a long tradition, Sanderson said. “Like all Anglo-Catholic parishes, I think, you see the truth of the Incarnation in the Eucharist, which leads you to see the truth of the Incarnation in the oppressed. We have a heart to serve our neighborhood, which we attempt to do in a number of ways. Most all of the Anglo-Catholic parishes that I know of have been on the fringe of the city, not down on the corner of Meeting and Broad.”

The city of Charleston did, indeed, seem to indulge on this sunny, balmy late spring day in a spirit of graciousness. Darby, the NAACP official, was quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying, “I’m not worried about dead Confederates. It’s the live ones in the Legislature that worry me.”

As it was time for the procession to begin at the Battery, a small plane droned overhead, trailing behind it a huge Confederate battle flag. People walking from Holy Communion on Ashley Street eastward would have passed a small YMCA with a mural painted on its window of a black and white child together, with the caption “Dr. King’s Dream.”

Most African-Americans stayed away from the parade route along East Bay Street, but three workmen taking a break in the shade about three blocks west ventured a few opinions. Martin Reed said, “I don’t see any big deal about, if you ask me. I’m not upset about it, but I don’t see the big deal about it either.” David Hutchinson added, “Personally, I don’t have a problem with it.” A third man, Frank Lassiter, agreed. “It don’t bother me one way or the other, just as long as they don’t fence us again. If they fence us again, they’ll be real something wrong!”

A few blocks away, a cab driver, Eric Thompson, who moved to Charleston from New York about six years ago, said that he had not experienced any particular racial discrimination since his arrival. “I wonder whether it might not have been better, though, not to disturb the men, but just to leave them there in their underwater grave,” he observed.

I thought there were some interesting perspectives in this account of the funeral of the Hunley crew. I also thought it was interesting, given the national issues with the ECUSA, to note that this funeral was done at an ECUSA parish. And I'd love to have heard what the Baptists in attendance at a full-blown "smells and bells" Anglo-Catholic ECUSA funeral mass and Holy Eucharist were thinking. A service like that is more like an RCC service than most RCC services ....

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