James Craik

Elected 1862, Day 1; served to 1877

James Craik was born on August 31, 1806, in Alexandria, Virginia, the son of George Washington Craik. His father died in 1808, leaving him to be raised in his early years by his grandfather, Dr. James Craik, President George Washington’s friend and physician. In his grandfather’s house, Craik grew up alongside people enslaved by his family. He would write later that he was one “who was nursed by a slave” and “whose earliest playmates were slave children.”1

Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Craik studied medicine; however, he never practiced. He then followed in the footsteps of his late father and late uncle – an uncle who willed to him four enslaved people: Archibald, Betsy, Rose, and Lewis – and studied law.2 Craik earned his license to practice in Virginia on November 26, 1828, and moved to Charleston, where he worked as an attorney for many years. Although, Craik recalled drifting away from religion during his teens and early twenties, he returned to the church and was ordained in 1839. He began his pastoral career as traveling priest serving parishes and small congregations in the Kanawha Valley.

On May 27, 1844, the vestry of Christ Church in Louisville, Kentucky unanimously elected James Craik as Rector. He formally took charge on August 1, 1844. He bought a thirty-acre parcel of land near Louisville to build a farm, a place he called “Kanawha.”

In his nearly thirty-eight years of service to the church, he was respected as a member of good-standing in the community and a charitable man who founded the Orphanage of the Good Shepherd and the Church Home and Infirmary. Craik was also remembered as an engaging speaker and writer, using fully his rhetorical skills in his plea to the Kentucky Legislature to reject secession in a speech entitled The Union.

In his speech, Craik argued for his vision of the United States as that of a unified country dedicated to the liberty of the people, and one in which the federal and state governments existed as equals to check each other’s power; however, in this vision, “the people” were only a favored few. Craik’s vision was rooted in American myth making, colonialism, and a social understanding that there existed a natural progression from “barbarism” to “civilization.”3

This government, as Craik described, was inspired by God and honored the oneness of the people – their shared origin, history, and allegiance – as well as their agency through separate local governments. Through the repeated emphasis on the common nationality of “the people,” Craik made it clear who was excluded from the benefits of this new government. The ideals of the Constitution, he maintained, were not for the indigenous peoples of the Americas, who were “treacherous savages,” existing in Craik’s story of the country’s establishment to be “watched, propitiated, [and] conquered.”4 The ideals of the Constitution were also not for recent immigrants who failed to share the colonial origin story, such as the newly-arrived European immigrants who carried with them their own origins, histories, and allegiances. And, emphatically, the ideals of the Constitution were not for enslaved Africans and their descendants.

Craik also dismissed the legitimacy of abolition in this speech. He set all abolitionists as equal to those who held abolition as a moral position; to those “wordy fire-brands” who advocated for it publicly, people such as Maria Stewart, a free descendant of enslaved people who wrote in favor of both abolition and women’s rights, and Horace Greeley, the newspaperman who coined the phrase “Bleeding Kansas” to describe the bloody border wars; and to people bold in the pursuit of freedom, such as John Brown, or, as Craik called him and his followers, “the murderous insurrectionists of Harper’s Ferry.”5 Furthermore, he called their abolitionist beliefs a “miserable plea,” a “pseudo moral and religious fanaticism,” and an expression of Ego and self worship.6 Should such people gain a majority in the federal government and attempt to end slavery and “perpetrate their folly,” he said, the state governments should use their power within the framework of the Constitution to stop it.7

Two years later, in 1862, Craik expounded on his pro-slavery position in a far less subtle work entitled Slavery in the South: or, What is our Present Duty to the Slaves? In this pamphlet, Craik framed Slavery in the South as a letter to an anonymous friend in Boston in order to address the general arguments of abolitionists and mentioned by name Horace Greeley, the abolitionist publisher of the New York Tribune.

In August 1862, Greeley would use the New York Tribune to write an open letter to President Lincoln entitled The Prayer of Twenty Millions. The letter chastised Lincoln for failing in his duty towards enslaved people, saying “You…knowing well what an abomination Slavery is, and how emphatically it is the core and essence of this atrocious Rebellion, seem never to interfere with these atrocities, and never give a direction to your Military subordinates, which does not appear to have been conceived in the interest of Slavery rather than of Freedom.”8

About the core and essence of the Civil War, the “causa causans,” Craik disagreed. He acknowledged slavery was a “bad institution,” but not for the reasons Greeley and other abolitionists called it an abomination.9 Slavery, he argued, was not a bad institution for reducing human beings to chattel, even though it was described so painfully in contemporary memoirs such as Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853, and Austin Steward’s Twenty-two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman, published in 1857.

Indeed, Craik argued that enslaved people were provided for more comfortably than poor white laborers, that abuse was infrequent due to masters’ beneficence and social pressures, and that family separation was no more painful or unnatural than that experienced by any other person leaving their family for another place.10

Craik argued that slavery was a bad institution because it was expensive for the enslavers, created a permanent labor caste, provided lower quality labor than free white laborers, led to a contempt for labor among the children of enslavers, and made “every master and mistress the slaves of their servants” due to their paternal concern for and responsibilities towards the people whom they enslaved.11 As for the causa causans of the war, slavery was merely a difference between the North and South that those who wished to see the dissolution of the United States, such as British abolitionists and people possessed by a “wicked spirit of sectional jealousy,” could exploit. If slavery did not exist, he claimed, they would have found another cause.12

Despite Craik’s argument that slavery was such a burden to the South that the region longed to be free of it, he and his pro-slavery brethren rejected the abolition of slavery. Their reasons extended from economic concerns – the loss of an entire workforce would be devastating to Southern industry – to fears of violence; the Haitian Revolution loomed large in white American consciousness.13 But Craik also believed, as illustrated in his speech to the Kentucky Legislature, that God gave to the “white race” a civilizing mission.14 Among the Indigenous peoples, that “mission” was expressed through conquest. Among the enslaved peoples it was “to [guide] and [control] their labor, for the common benefit of both races, and [impart] to them, as their improving faculties [enabled] them to receive it, the blessing of religious, moral and intellectual culture,” eventually making them near-equals to the “master race” and thus capable of managing freedom and self government.15 Craik foresaw this as happening many generations in the future, no doubt extended by laws in the South restricting the education of enslaved people.16 This process, he claimed, was the “grand Providential solution of a Providential problem.”17 In fighting for abolition, he argued, Greeley and the other abolitionists were defying God.

In the same year that Slavery in the South was published, Craik was unanimously elected as President of the House of Deputies at the General Convention held in New York. He was subsequently elected unanimously for four of the five terms he served: 1862, 1868, 1871, and 1874. None of the resolutions concerning the Civil War voted upon by the deputies in 1862 made any mention of the causa causans of the war, slavery, by name. One referred to the war, and the corresponding divide between The Episcopal Church and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America, as a “just punishment of our sins.”18 Another resolved that General Convention would not involve itself in the Civil War or judgements concerning it as it was a purely civil matter.19

Craik served for fifteen years as President of the House of Deputies and a total of thirty-five as a deputy to that governing body (1846-1881). He died on June 9, 1882.

In 2024, Craik was repudiated unanimously by both the House of Deputies and the House Bishops in Resolution 2024-D074 at the 81st General Convention held in Louisville, Kentucky.

  1. Craik, James. Slavery in the South; or, What is our Present Duty to the Slaves? (Boston: Prentiss & Deland, 1862), 5. ↩︎
  2. Michael M. Wood, “A Second Fight for Freedom: The Enslaved of Dr. James Craik, Chief Physician – Journal of the American Revolution,” Journal of the American Revolution, June 25, 2024, https://allthingsliberty.com/2024/06/a-second-fight-for-freedom-the-enslaved-of-dr-james-craik-chief-physician. ↩︎
  3. Lepore, Jill. These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 192. ↩︎
  4. Craik, James. The Union. National and State Sovereignty alike essential to Americaln Liberty: A Discourse Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives at the Capitol in Frankfort, KY. (Louisville, KY: Norton & Griswold, 1860), 9. ↩︎
  5. Craik, The Union, 24. ↩︎
  6. Craik, The Union, 25. ↩︎
  7. Craik, The Union, 25. ↩︎
  8. Horace Greeley to Abraham Lincoln (clipping of letter; endorsed by Lincoln), August 1, 1862 in Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/mal4233500/ ↩︎
  9. Craik, Slavery in the South, 5. ↩︎
  10. Craik, Slavery in the South, 13. ↩︎
  11. Craik, Slavery in the South, 7. ↩︎
  12. Craik, Slavery in the South, 5. ↩︎
  13. Lepore, These Truths, 142. ↩︎
  14. Craik, The Union, 7. ↩︎
  15. Craik, Slavery in the South, 14. ↩︎
  16. Lepore, These Truths, 205. ↩︎
  17. Craik, Slavery in the South, 15. ↩︎
  18. The Episcopal Church, Journal of the Proceedings of the Bishops, Clergy, and Laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of American Assembled in a General Convention, Held in St. John’s Chapel in the City of New York, from October 1st to October 13th inclusive, in the Year of Our Lord 1862. (E. P. Dutton & Company, 1863), 31-32. ↩︎
  19. The Episcopal Church, Journal of the Proceedings, 86-87. ↩︎