Talk about walking a line.
If clergy today feel they must be careful not to take sides in an election, imagine the predicament of Thomas Hooke McCallie, then-pastor of Chattanooga’s First Presbyterian Church, who would not take a side during the Civil War.
“That was his choice,” said Dr. David McCallie, 89, who recently edited and published his grandfather’s memoir, “THM: A Memoir,” which focused a good bit on the war. “He was not speaking for the church.”
On one hand, the elder man was educated at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, could recite abolition arguments and, his grandson said, came to realize slavery was wrong.
On the other hand, McCallie inherited slaves, knew churches of all denominations in the South supported slavery and felt the U.S. government had no right to coerce the South to stay in the union.
“He thought slavery should be settled in the courts of the land,” he said.
As the war was fought to completion, McCallie earned enemies on both sides.
The Confederate Army stole all the corn from his farm in Birchwood, while the Union Army convicted him of treason, took over his church as a hospital and ordered him to vacate his house.
McCallie said the Confederates never would have confiscated the corn of someone with overt Southern support. And while the Union army convicted him of treason, it never did what it threatened – to send him North and, later, to banish him to his farm.
“I guess he was known by both sides to be against them,” he said.
In fact, McCallie said, his grandfather urged his relatives in Chattanooga not to join the Confederate Army and his relatives on the farm not to join the Union Army.
There came a time, though, when keeping them out of the armies was impossible, he said.
The Union Army also did not, in the end, force him to vacate his house, which was at the corner of McCallie and Lindsay streets, facing Lindsay,
where First-Centenary United Methodist Church is today.
“We felt that nothing but the interposition of Heaven could avert the blow that was about to fall with such terrible power on us,” he wrote in the memoir. “That … was a night of prayer. Like lambs trembling in the presence of a voracious beast that was about to devour them we were in fear, and in our fear took refuge in the promise ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.'”
The next morning, his feeble mother donned a black dress and went with McCallie to see the general in charge. After he spoke, he wrote, his mother told the general “she had but a few more years at the very utmost to spend on earth and that all she asked was to be allowed to remain in her home unmolested and be laid in the grave beside her husband.” The general, moved by her passion, rescinded the order.
First Presbyterian, then located at Market and Seventh streets, where the Central Block Building is today, was used for more than a year as a hospital. Eventually, the U.S. government paid $4,600 to have it repaired. It was a full three years, though, before the church re-entered its “main audience room,” the membership reduced from 150 to 15 or 20 people.
That remnant, for part of the three years, 1863-1866, met at McCallie’s house. Those meetings, his grandson said, were about the only church meetings in the city during that time.
The elder McCallie went on to serve at First Presbyterian until 1873 and lived until 1912. In the last decade before his death, he gave his home (he had moved to the side of Missionary Ridge), surrounding property and some capital for two of his sons to start what became known as McCallie School.
“THM: A Memoir” is available at Amazon.com or may be ordered through Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million.