John Johns (July 10, 1796 – April 5, 1876) was the fourth Episcopal bishop of Virginia. He led his diocese into secession and during the American Civil War and later tried to heal it through the Reconstruction Era. Johns also served as President of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg before that war, and led and taught at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria after the war.
Biography
Early life and education
Born into a prominent political family in New Castle, Delaware, in 1796, John Johns was the son of Chief Justice Kensey Johns. His mother, Ann Van Dyke, was the daughter of Governor Nicholas Van Dyke of Delaware. However, young John Johns was raised at the family's estate in Maryland, the Cliffs in Calvert County, established by his emigrant Quaker ancestor in 1660.
In 1815, Johns graduated from Princeton College in New Jersey and from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1819. On November 20, 1820, he married the first of his three wives, Julianna Jackson, also of Calvert County, and who moved west with her new husband to Frederick County.
Ministry
Bishop William White ordained Johns to the deaconate of the Episcopal Church in 1819 in Philadelphia. In 1820, Maryland's Bishop James Kemp ordained Johns (then 23) to the priesthood. He served at All Saints Church in Frederick, Maryland for the next eight years.
In Frederick, the scholarly Johns honed his preaching and pastoral skills. Then, despite being offered a significant pay raise to remain in Frederick, he accepted a call to Christ Church in Baltimore on July 21, 1828. His successor in Frederick was his brother Henry Van Dyke Johns, who was ordained deacon by bishop White in 1826, and who about three years later became the first rector of (now-demolished) Trinity Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. and later Emmanuel Church in Baltimore.
Rev. Johns became known as a scholar, as well as for his active evangelism, which was strongly Calvinistic (their father's family was a mix of Presbyterians and Episcopalians). He preached "a direct personal approach to Him, whose language is 'Come unto me'" and criticized Tractarians for exalting "the priest at the expense of the Saviour." He attended many meetings of the Board of Missions of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and also in 1840 delivered a lecture to the American Whig and Cliosophic Societies of his alma mater.
Fellow Maryland Episcopalians twice nominated Rev. John Johns to become their Bishop of Maryland, but never achieved the requisite 2/3 majority—the conventions deadlocked over issues including high church/low church and slavery. He was first passed over at the age of 32, when the electors deadlocked upon the successor to Bishop Kemp, who died unexpectedly young in 1827, and which prompted Johns to accept the rectorship at (later demolished) Christ Church, Baltimore, nearer the high church candidate Dr. William E. Wyatt of Baltimore's St. Paul's Church. However the next year Rev. Johns lost to compromise candidate Rev. William Murray Stone, from an established family on Maryland's Eastern Shore. When bishop Stone died in 1838, Johns was again the candidate of the low church party and Wyatt the high church candidate. Rather than again split the diocese, both Johns and Wyatt united to nominate (future Pennsylvania bishop) Dr. Alonzo Potter, but the ballots again favored Johns, but still not by the necessary supermajority. The next compromise candidate, Dr. Manton Eastburn of Massachusetts declined the election, as did missionary bishop Jackson Kemper. Two years later, in 1840, William Rollinson Whittingham was elected Maryland's bishop.
Meanwhile, in 1823, Rev. Johns invited Rev. William Meade, who lived not far across the Potomac River in Virginia, as a guest preacher at All Saints. That year, Rev. Meade (a dedicated evangelist and low churchman like Johns) had helped found new Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS), along with Francis Scott Key and others. In 1825 Rev. Johns was first elected a manager (trustee) of VTS, along with Meade, Key and others. He was elected Fourth Vice President of the institution in 1826, 1827 and 1831, then First Vice President in 1842. Meade had become assistant bishop to Bishop Richard Channing Moore of Virginia in 1829, and in 1842 asked Johns to become his assistant bishop when he succeeded Rt. Rev. Moore upon the latter's death.