James Osgood Andrew was a 19th century Methodist Episcopal Church bishop whose possession of enslaved people was a source of controversy within the denomination. Andrew became a symbol of the slavery that split the Church in 1844 and ushered in the separation of the Northern and Southern Methodist Episcopalists the following year.
Mary Cosby and John Andrew’s son, James Osgood Andrew, was born in Wilkes County on May 3, 1794. In 1789, his father was the first native Georgian to enter the Methodist service. Young Andrew was approved to preach by the South Carolina Conference in 1812. The first twenty years of his service included Salt Ketcher County in South Carolina, Bladen County in North Carolina, and Augusta and Savannah Counties in Georgia. In 1824 he was named presiding elder of the Edisto District, which also included Charleston, South Carolina. From 1820 to 1832 he was elected delegate to the four-yearly general conferences and in 1832 elected bishop. Andrew moved from Augusta to Newton County in 1836 to be near the Methodist Manual Labor School, of which he was the trustee. This institution later became Emory College, Oxford. His episcopal duties led him to annual conferences all over the south and west.
James Osgood Andrew Courtesy Andrew College
The details of Andrew’s status as a slave owner, and particularly how he acquired it, has been the subject of some debate. According to most published reports, Andrew never bought or sold an enslaved person; rather, he had become a slave owner through his wives. In 1816 Andrew Ann married Amelia MacFarlane, with whom he had six children. After her death in 1842, she left him an enslaved person. Andrew’s second wife, Leonora Greenwood, whom he married in 1844, was also a slave owner. When she died in 1854, he married Emily Sims Childers.
However, there is some evidence that Andrew may have acquired enslaved humans for the first time before 1842. A man named James Osgood Andrew is listed as the owner of two enslaved people in the Athens Census of 1830, although that man may not have been the bishop. The 1840 U.S. Census, conducted four years after he moved to Newton County, lists him as a resident of that county and the owner of thirteen enslaved people.
Andrew’s status as an enslaver, by whatever means, was contrary to episcopal custom. At the General Conference of 1844 a growing abolitionist movement emerged among the Methodist ranks. The real question was whether the Methodist Episcopal Church would accept or reject slavery. Northern delegates supported a resolution calling on Andrew to refrain from serving as an episcopal while he was in possession of enslaved people. Southern delegates countered that the church would be destroyed in states that forbid emancipation. The resolution was passed by 110 votes to 69. A plan of separation between Northern and Southern Episcopalian Methodists emerged, and the next year representatives of the Southern Annual Conferences met in Louisville, Kentucky to organize their own church. The first general conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, met in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1846, and Andrew was invited to preside.
During his career, Andrew wrote for religious magazines and published two books, Family Government (1846) and Miscellanies (1854). During the Civil War (1861-65) he lived in Summerfield, Alabama. After retiring in 1866, Andrew continued to hold church conferences when his health permitted. He died in the home of a daughter and son-in-law, Reverend and Mrs. JW Rush, in Mobile, Alabama, in 1871 and was buried in Oxford. Andrew College in Cuthbert is named after him.
