FPCG’s Early Pastor a Foe of Slavery
1816: Rev. Bourne Serves as an Anti-Slavery Witness
Black History Month is the appropriate time to recall this church’s first protest against slavery; it was expressed in the call to the ministry and the support of one of the first Presbyterian ministers to denounce “the soul damning sin” of human bondage.
The February 27, 1816 entry into the minutes of the vestry [today’s Session and Deacons] of “The English Speaking Church in Germantown” [today’s FPCG] noted that ”Presbytery being informed that a Mr. Bourne is preaching in the congregation in Germantown without being introduced to the vacancy by a Committee appointed for the purpose of introducing strangers to our vacancies, and that the said Mr. Bourne has been deposed from the office of the Gospel ministry by the Presbytery to which he formerly belonged, it was on motion resolved that the preaching of said Mr. Bourne in the Germantown congregation is deemed irregular.”
In 1815, 195 years ago, this church called the Rev. George Bourne of South River, Virginia, to the pulpit. Before his arrival in Germantown, however, he was expelled from the ministry by the Presbytery of Lexington, Virginia, for his denunciation of slavery.
While he was serving in Virginia, Mr. Bourne became very much aware of the plantation system and slavery. Appalled and revolted, he became a pioneer in the American Anti-Slavery Society.
In 1815, just before he arrived in Germantown to preach for the first time, Bourne appeared before the General Assembly and tried to introduce an anti-slavery overture. He criticized the Presbyterian ministers, elders and church members of Virginia for their cruel and inhuman treatment of their slaves. Three more times, in 1816, 1817 and 1818, he took his case before the Assembly.
He explained that he had a unique vantage point from which to speak since had been installed in slave territory. Slave‑holding was "man stealing" according to the Bible and was therefore a "soul damning sin in the sight of God," he asserted. Slave holders should be ejected immediately from the church, and slave holding ministers were blasphemous. His 1816 book The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable was published in 1816 in Germantown. Bourne was so powerful in his denunciations that the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison remarked that next to the Bible he had been most influenced by Bourne's book.
Knowing of Bourne's stance, the Germantown church still wanted him. They still wanted him when the congregation was told by the Presbytery of Philadelphia that Mr. Bourne could not serve. Dr. Blair, the founding pastor of the church, and the congregation by unanimous vote supported the minister by formally calling him to the church on June 16, 1816, thus further invoking the censure of the Presbytery.
Although many of the historical details are sketchy, the action of the Presbytery resulted in Dr. Blair's resignation from the church for over a year until a reconciliation took place between the dissenting groups. Click here for more information about Rev. Bourne.