Cornelius W. Grafton

Rev. Dr. Cornelius W. Grafton—often described as “Mississippi’s greatest minister”—pastored two rural Presbyterian churches in southwestern Mississippi for sixty-one consecutive years, from his ordination in 1873 to his death in 1934.

Grafton was born in 1846 in Madison County, where he was raised in the Concord Presbyterian Church and educated in the Concord schoolhouse. He enlisted in the Confederate Army at Canton in 1864 and served one year. In 1866 he enrolled at the University of Mississippi and joined a student prayer meeting with Charles Betts Galloway, a lifelong friend who later became bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Grafton graduated with first honors in the class of 1868.

After teaching school in Sardis for two years, he began formal preparations for the ministry at Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina under some of the South’s most influential Presbyterians, including James Woodrow, Joseph R. Wilson, Benjamin M. Palmer, and John L. Girardeau. He finished seminary in the spring of 1873 and married Sue Doak of Sardis on May 18 of that year. Cornelius and Sue had seven children, and in 1885 Sue died. In 1891 Grafton married Kate Wharton of Port Gibson, who helped organize the Women’s Auxiliary of the Presbytery of Mississippi.

On 24 July 1873 the Presbyterian Church in the United States ordained Grafton, and he took up the pastorates of Union Church Presbyterian Church in Jefferson County and Ben Salem Presbyterian Church in Lincoln County. Despite many opportunities elsewhere, he served these two congregations for the rest of his life.

His work as a minister revolved around Sundays, and Sundays revolved around the sermon. Week after week for more than six decades he preached doctrinal and practical sermons on subjects ranging from justification by faith in Jesus Christ to Sabbath observance to family piety. His sermons, like his other writings, presupposed the inerrancy of Scripture, expounded Presbyterian beliefs as outlined in the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, and aimed at conversion to Christian faith and consecration in Christian living. Many of the emphases of his sermons and writings overlapped with those of the fundamentalist movement, which, according to historian George Marsden, “militantly opposed both modernism in theology and the cultural changes that modernism endorsed.”

Grafton defended Mississippi’s race-based social hierarchy as ordained by God, yet he vocally and consistently opposed lynching as a violation of God’s commandments. In a Sunday sermon after the 1919 lynching of Dock Gordon in Union Church, he called his entire congregation to stand and “confess this sin done among us and denounce it with grief and indignation.” He taught that lynching undermined the rule of law, used lethal force that only the magistrate had the right to exercise, threatened social order, and violated the Sixth Commandment.

Through his teaching, speaking, and writing, Grafton’s influence reached beyond Union Church and Ben Salem. He served as principal of the Union Church School (later Jefferson Country Agricultural High School) from 1883 to 1894. He regularly participated in regional and statewide church courts, often spoke at special church services and school assemblies, and wrote numerous articles that circulated throughout the state. His monthly column, “Dr. Grafton’s Message” ran from 1915 to 1928 in the Mississippi Visitor, a statewide Presbyterian newspaper. In this column, Grafton addressed subjects from biblical textual criticism to dancing to juvenile delinquency to gravel roads and automobiles to tornadoes to Mississippi church history. In 1927 he completed his book-length “History of Presbyterianism in Mississippi,” which describes in sermonic style the development of Presbyterian mission, churches, and institutions in the state from the last years of the eighteenth century through first quarter of the twentieth. Despite church support and promised financial backing from the Eastman Memorial Foundation, his manuscript was never published.

In 1916 the Southern Presbyterian Church elected Grafton to be the moderator of its annual general assembly, the most distinguished office in the denomination. He received honorary doctorates from Southwestern Presbyterian University (now Rhodes College) and the University of Mississippi. According to his biographer, Allen Cabaniss, the latter even offered him its presidency. The Jackson Clarion-Ledger printed frontpage articles on him on three consecutive days after he died. In one of them, First Presbyterian Church of Jackson minister J. B. Hutton wrote, “Perhaps no state has not known, in some manner, the influence of this sturdy soldier of Christ. Certainly, all of the Southland knew him well—knew him and cherished his holy works.”

Multiple Grafton descendants occupied positions of ecclesiastical and cultural significance. His son Thomas B. Grafton served as a Presbyterian missionary in China before returning to the US to pastor Vicksburg’s First Presbyterian Church. Grafton’s great-granddaughter Sue Grafton attained literary prominence with her alphabet series of mystery novels, beginning with “A” Is for Alibi.