The Presbyterian General Synod in pre-Revolution America - "it was the only organisation which embraced all the colonies" / "the grandest conception of civil liberty that the human race was ever blessed with"

So said Rev John H. Bryson (1831-1897) of First Presbyterian Church, Huntsville, Alabama (minister there from 1880–1897) in his address to the Fourth Congress of the Scotch Irish Society of America in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1891. In our secularising age it is easy to forget the social cohesion that church structures provided. 

"This distribution of the Scotch-Irish over the whole country made it possible for them to exert a most powerful influence when the occasion should arise. So soon as they were settled down in their new homes they organised themselves into Churches and Presbyteries (for they were Presbyterians), and in 1717 a General Synod was founded. By 1770, this delegated Synod was the most powerful religious organisation in the country. Indeed, it was the only organisation which embraced all the colonies. The ministry were an able body of men, graduates of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton."

Bryson had seen a lot in his lifetime. He was a minister in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, as was his father Rev Henry Bryson (1799–1874). John had been born in Fayetteville, Tennessee, in 1831 and in 1854 became minister of Hopewell in Maury County, Tennessee. He was a chaplain to the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. Here's a portrait, from this book, which is also in the Proceedings and Addresses of the Fifth Congress. He died in 1897 in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

Here is an article from The Anderson Intelligencer, Anderson, South Carolina, 7 June 1888, some 23 years after the Civil War –

The Blue and the Grey.

Many persons in South Carolina will remember the Rev. Dr. Bryson who was several years pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Columbia. Dr. Bryson was during the war chaplain in chief of the Confederate army of Tennessee. He was in Philadelphia during the recent Centennial Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. The Philadelphia Times last week says: 

"At the Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, 37th and Chesnut, the Rev. J. H. Bryson, of Alabama, ex moderator of the Southern General Assembly, preached an eloquent sermon to a crowded congregation. In alluding to his presence there that morning, Dr. Bryson said that but a few minutes before the commencement of the service he had learned that pastor, the Rev. Dr. McCook, had been a chaplain to the Union forces during the late war, while he had been chaplain to the Confederate forces. He alluded to several incidents of that bloody feud, and then turning to the pastor, in a voice trembling with emotion offered the band of peace and friendship, and in the presence of the congregation, who rose as a body, the two clergymen shook hands and blessed each other. It was an impressive incident and many of the congregation were visibly affected by it."

 

This encounter took place in the years when the concept for the Scotch-Irish Society of America was taking shape. The idea for the Society had been floated at the Pan-Presbyterian Council in Belfast on 4 July 1884, and the Society held its inaugural Congress at Columbia in Tennessee on 8-11 May 1889.

This same Rev Dr Henry McCook would soon be, along with Bryson, a leading figure in the Society. McCook was also the author of several historical volumes such as the 'Whiskey Rebellion' novel The Latimers - A Tale of the Western Insurrection of 1794.

The Scotch-Irish Society of America was born a generation after the 1861-65 Civil War, where the nation sought narratives to bind up the remaining wounds of past conflict. Its membership and annual Congresses seem to have been almost equally organised on a North / South basis. A series of Presidents in the late 1800s and early 1900s asserted their own Ulster roots in speeches and books.

To some extent, Scotch-Irishness provided an 'Old World' story for the new generation in post-Civil War America. And the various forms of Presbyterianism were the bedrock.

............

At the Second Congress of the Scotch Irish Society of America, held in Pittsburgh in 1890, Bryson's address included these remarks –

"... There is yet to be written for the American people — and when I say for the American people, I do not limit it to this country — but there is yet to be written for the American people a history that will thrill this world with its wonders, and wondrous thought at its grand and great conceptions, and it will lay bare the foundations of civil and religious liberty ...

The Scotch -Irish race is a people that have the strongest, that have the truest, that have the grandest conception of civil liberty that the human race was ever blessed with...

It was by reason of that long series of struggles through which our people were compelled to go when they came first to the American borders that they were taught and realised the infinite value of freedom...

In every nation and in every age that preceded us, the church and state were united, but it remained for the Scotch-Irish of America to say that they should be separated from one another...

Teach your children to love the blood that runs in their veins. Teach them to love its history ; to love its people..."