Stephen Elliott

Stephen Elliott (August 31, 1806 – December 21, 1866) was the 37th bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. He was the first Bishop of Georgia and Provisional Bishop of Florida. He was also the first and only Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America. Early life and career He was born on August 31, 1806, in Beaufort, South Carolina, the son of Stephen Elliott the botanist. He attended Harvard and graduated in 1825 from South Carolina College, where he was president of the Clariosophic Society. He studied law and practiced in Charleston (where he was one of the founders of the Forensic Club) and Beaufort, South Carolina from 1827 until 1833. Elliott had a conversion experience during a sermon by Presbyterian evangelist Daniel Baker (1791–1857) at the Parish Church of St. Helena in Beaufort, South Carolina. He became a candidate for holy orders in the Episcopal Church in 1833, was ordained a deacon on February 15, 1835, by Bishop Nathaniel Bowen of South Carolina, and a priest the following year. A professor of sacred literature and revealed religion, Elliot taught at South Carolina College from 1835 to 1841. Family life Elliott married his cousin, Mary Gibbes Barnwell, daughter of a colonel Robert W. Barnwell, on Nov. 18, 1828. After her death, he married another cousin, Charlotte Bull Barnwell, daughter of John G. Barnwell and granddaughter of two Revolutionary army generals, General John Barnwell and of Stephen Bull. Among their children were Robert W. B. Elliott (1840–1887), missionary bishop to West Texas; John Gibbes Barnwell Elliott, M. D.; R. Habersham Elliott; and their youngest, the novelist Sarah Barnwell Elliott (1848–1928). (Note: a common misconception, frequently published, especially online, is that Confederate Brigadier-General Stephen Elliott Jr. (1832–1866) was the son of Elliott. The General was the son of Elliott's first cousin, another Stephen Elliott (1804–1866).)