Capers, Ellison
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Capers, Ellison
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Ellison Capers was an important political and religious leader in South Carolina and Confederate veteran, a renowned defender of the Lost Cause, and Chancellor of the University of the South from 1904-1908.
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Son of a Methodist bishop, Ellison Capers was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He graduated in 1856 from the South Carolina Military Academy, the Citadel, after which he taught there. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Capers joined the Confederate Army. Serving first in a coastal defense unit, Capers joined the army of General Joseph E. Johnson in 1863 and participated in the Vicksburg Campaign in which he was wounded. After his recovery, he served in the Chickamauga Campaign with the Army of Tennessee and in the Battle of Franklin. Capers was promoted to brigadier general in 1865. Capers returned to South Carolina after the war and was appointed Secretary of State for South Carolina. Having begun theological studies before the war, Capers was ordained a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1867 and served as rector of Christ Church in Greenville for twenty years. He was consecrated Bishop of South Carolina in 1894 and was chancellor of the University of the South from 1904-08.
According to historian Charles Reagan Wilson, the clergyman spoke at so many Confederate memorial dedications he was known as "Orator Laureate of the Lost Cause." Capers defended the Confederate cause as “the right of a free people, of Anglo-Saxon blood and history, to choose for themselves the government which would but promote their prosperity and happiness." At the 1901 dedication of the South Carolina monument at Chickamauga, Capers counted it
"amongst the dearest experiences of my life that I knew my comrades and had the honor of being a fellow soldier with them ... his must be a sordid heart that can feel no exaltation of his nature here today when the great Government under which we live, and against which we strove with all our might and main, hails Ex Confederate soldiers on a battlefield of common glory, and salutes with its triumphant flag the monument South Carolina has erected to Confederate valor."
The cover of the biography of Capers, written by his son, was imprinted with the Lost Cause symbols of the Christian Confederate soldier: a crossed sword and crozier, surmounted by the Bible, underneath the bishop's miter.
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1837
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1908
Position: 10842 (8 views)
