25 Facts About John Johns

John Johns was the fourth Episcopal bishop of Virginia.

John Johns led his diocese into secession during the American Civil War and later tried to heal it through the Reconstruction Era.

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.

John Johns served at All Saints Church in Frederick, Maryland for the next eight years.

In Frederick, the scholarly Johns honed his preaching and pastoral skills.

Rev Johns became known as a scholar, as well as for his active evangelism, which was strongly Calvinistic.

John Johns 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 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.

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.

In 1825 Rev Johns was first elected a manager of VTS, along with Meade, Key and others.

John Johns 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.

In 1842, John Johns was consecrated bishop and named Assistant Bishop of Virginia by its newly elected Bishop, William Meade, who had requested an assistant to avoid the long interregnums after the deaths of his two predecessors, as well as handle episcopal duties in the vast diocese.

Rev Johns thus became the first bishop consecrated in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

John Johns's consecrators included Bishops Alexander Viets Griswold, William Meade, and Levi Ives, who delivered the consecratory sermon.

In 1853, Bishop Johns confirmed Robert E Lee in the Episcopal Church.

From 1849 until 1854, in addition to his episcopal duties, Johns served as the fifteenth president of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

John Johns participated in the only consecration by bishops in that church, of Richard Hooker Wilmer to the Diocese of Alabama, held on March 6,1862, in Richmond.

Bishop Johns regularly preached at Richmond's Libby Prison during the War.

John Johns declined an offer from the national church's Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society to pay salaries to him and his impoverished clergy, saying they all preferred to suffer the same privations as their people.

Bishop Johns was twice named the "savior" of the church in Virginia.

John Johns had married three times and willed most of his property to his two sons.

John Johns founded the Alexandria Infirmary in 1882, which became Alexandria Hospital.