Existing comment:
Civil War to Civil Rights
Downtown Heritage Trail
w.1 The Church of the Epiphany
"Carpets, cushions,
and hymnbooks
were packed away...
ambulances began to stop...
lastly come the surgeons...."
-- Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington
Church spires dominated the skyline of the city of Washington at the time of the Civil War, symbolizing the importance of houses of worship in the religious, social and political life of the nation's capital. While Washington still claims an extraordinary number of historic downtown churches, the Church of the Epiphany is the only original pre-Civil War downtown church building to survive. Its walls were witness to the suffering of the wounded soldiers for whom it was a temporary hospital. Here, as in other churches, planks were laid on top of the pews to make a platform for the beds.
Episcopalians founded the Church of the Epiphany in 1842. By the time of the Civil War, it was located in a residential neighborhood of strong Southern sympathies. Washington, although the capital of the Union, was a Southern city, carved originally from the states of Maryland and Virginia. Many Washington residents had family and friends in the South, and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and wives often held conflicting loyalties. Even First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln had three brothers fighting for the Confederacy. Northerners accused the city of being "Secesh," short for secessionist.
At one time, Senator Jefferson Davis, who became the president of the Confederacy, lived nearby and was an Epiphany member. Senator Judah P. Benjamin, later Davis's attorney general, and Senator Robert Toombs, who became Davis's secretary of state, lived on then-fashionable F Street one block over from the church.
The Reverend Charles Hall, Epiphany's rector, balanced his Southern sympathies with loyalty to the Union. He was so persuasive about his loyalty in a meeting with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton that the latter began to attend worship services at Epiphany on a regular basis, using the former pew of Jefferson Davis. With Stanton as an example, many Union generals, too, began to attend Epiphany. President Lincoln himself came here for the funeral of General Frederick Lander of the Army of the Army of the Potomac. |