Captured On A Beautiful Sabbath Day

Pastor Dwight Witherspoon burned with passion for God and country as he preached his farewell sermon to a flock of the faithful on April 30, 1861. The 25-year-old clergyman spoke on a Bible chapter and verse appropriate to the occasion: Psalm 20:7, “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.” Fittingly, after the sermon he left the church and joined a company of North Mississippi farm boys and students preparing to go to war.

Collection of David Wynn Vaughan Thomas Dwight Witherspoon as a private in the Lamar Rifles; carte de visite by Bingham & Bros. of Memphis, Tenn., circa 1866. 

Two days later Witherspoon wrote to a friend from a military camp near Corinth, “We have about 2,500 men here, a fine looking set indeed, most of them the true grit,” and added that all were “in fine spirits expecting soon to measure arms with the abolitionists.”

Witherspoon was one of a number of influential and outspoken Southern ministers at the intersection of religious affairs and politics, and he carried his pro-slavery message from the pulpit to the ranks of the Confederate army. Witherspoon had expressed his opinion of abolitionists in a public pronouncement months earlier. On Dec. 21, the day after South Carolina seceded, he delivered a sermon to fellow Presbyterians at his Oxford, Miss. church that blamed Republicans for the dissolution of the Union. “With that particular party which has been instrumental in bringing about these results, I have nothing to do. Were I speaking to abolitionists it would be my duty to defend the institution of slavery as an ordinance of God, to rebuke with all boldness and fidelity the folly and wickedness of their cause.”

After the war Witherspoon became an eminent leader in the Presbyterian Church. He died in 1898 at age 62. He added, “We should pray that God would remove that religious fanaticism at the North which has been immediately instrumental in bringing about the present state of affairs. I trust there is no one here present who would not desire if the subject of slavery could be forever settled upon its proper basis and all agitation of it cease, to see the union of these states under such circumstances perpetuated.”

 He was born in Alabama to parents described as Bible scholars who were “Presbyterians by principle, Christians of ardent piety.” They named their son after prominent theologian and Yale President Timothy Dwight.

His father died when he was 4 years old, and his mother took on full responsibility for his spiritual development. She took the challenge seriously. “At the early age of ten, her little boy gave beautiful proof of pious training, by publicly confessing Christ,” noted a biographer. Witherspoon later graduated from the newly opened University of Mississippi and the Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina. “There was something strangely spiritual about him that made us show him reverential respect,” observed a minister.
He was ordained in 1860, and church elders sent him to Oxford for his first assignment. Witherspoon was delighted to return to Mississippi. According to a biographer, he considered it “a high compliment to him personally, and practically a high eulogy upon the character of his preaching — its warmth and earnestness, and attractiveness to the young, of whom so many were gathered in the university and female schools of the town.”

Less than a year later, Witherspoon enlisted in the Lamar Rifles, a local militia company named for Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, a member of the House of Representatives who resigned to join the Mississippi Secession Convention. Lamar drafted the ordinance that severed ties with the Union. He went on to serve in the Confederate army and government; later, despite his secessionist activities, President Grover Cleveland appointed him to the Supreme Court. The Lamar Rifles mustered into the Confederate army as Company G of the 11th Mississippi Infantry in May 1861. Witherspoon served in the ranks as a private.

The war transformed him from a minister to a holy crusader. During the months that followed, he revealed his thoughts and emotions in letters to a friend. He wrote in one letter “that the thought of the holiness of our cause has given to me great enthusiasm in all which I fear is too great.” He added, “I have never felt such indifference to death in my life. I am ready to die by the hand of the enemy or by the hand of disease or in any other way, so I but fall at my rest as a Christian Soldier doing battle for my Country. I count not my own life dear if I may but embrace the great cause of defending my country from a fiendish invader and securing to it the rights which God has bestowed.”

In another letter he objected to a suggestion that Confederate troops should invade Union territory. “Let us defend our own soil and then the world will see that we cannot be subjugated. This is as it seems the only question involved in the war. We are not fighting to test the power of the two nations. I am for one willing to admit that the North is more powerful. It has more wealth, more fighting men and more material out of which to make them. It can raise and maintain a long standing army, but can it subjugate us. Can it force terms of submission upon us. This alone we are answering.”

Witherspoon traveled with the regiment to Virginia. Along the way, jubilant townspeople hailed him and his comrades as heroes. “In one place we found an old battered union flag, but it was so torn and soiled we did not think it worth tearing down and surely amused ourselves by firing into it as we passed,” he noted in one letter.

But the novelty of soldiering quickly wore off for Witherspoon. He longed to serve the spiritual needs of his comrades. He soon got the chance, when friends and officers in his regiment petitioned Jefferson Davis for a commission as a military chaplain, which he received in the summer of 1861. He spent much of the war ministering Mississippi volunteers in the Second and the 42nd regiments. “He was ever found at his post of duty, even when that was the outpost of the army or the advance line of battle,” recalled one preacher.

Such was the case at Gettysburg, where Chaplain Witherspoon picked up a gun and fought alongside his comrades. He fell into enemy hands after the three-day fight ended. “I was captured in the afternoon of a beautiful Sabbath day, the 5th of July, 1863, in a hospital tent, on the battlefield of Gettysburg, in the midst of a religious service, surrounded by the wounded on every hand, to whom I ministered, and at whose urgent solicitation I had voluntarily remained within the enemy’s lines,” he recalled. “For a few never-to-be-forgotten days this ministry was permitted me, and then our field hospital was broken up, the few surviving wounded were removed to the field hospitals of the Federal army, and the Confederate surgeons and chaplains transported to Northern prisons.”

Witherspoon spent several months in confinement at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, and was paroled in late 1863. He returned to the Confederates and surrendered with the remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House.