William Meade

William Meade (1789-1862) was born on 11 November 1789 in Frederick County, Virginia, the son of Colonel Richard Kidder Meade, an aide on General George Washington's staff during the Revolution, and Mary Fitzhugh Grymes. He attended a private school, Carter Hall, in Virginia and then entered the junior class at the College of New Jersey [Princeton University] in 1806. He graduated in 1808 and was valedictorian of his class.

Meade studied for the ministry of the Episcopal church under the Reverend Walter Dulaney Addison, the evangelical rector of St. John Parish, Maryland. Before his ordination, Meade married Mary Barnwell in 1810. They had three sons before her death in 1817. In 1820, he married Thomasia Nelson; they had no children.

Meade was ordained deacon in the Protestant Episcopal Church by Bishop James Madison of Virginia on 24 February 1811. He was ordained priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church by Bishop Claggett of Maryland several years later on 29 January 1818. In 1814, he became the minister for Frederick County, and in 1821 he became the rector of Christ Church, Winchester. With the help of Bishop Moore and William Holland Wilmer, they founded the Protestant Episcopal Seminary in Virginia in Alexandria in 1823. Meade was an opponent of slavery and was one of the charter members who met in Washington, D.C., in December 1816 to organize the American Society for the Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States.

On 29 May 1829 Meade was elected assistant bishop of Virginia on the first ballot and was consecrated on 19 August 1829. He served in this capacity until 12 November 1841, when Bishop Moore died and he became the third bishop of Virginia. He served in that position until his death.

Meade was strongly opposed to secession, but when Virginia left the Union he supported it. After the North-South split of the church, the first preliminary meeting of the dioceses in the Confederate States met in Montgomery, Alabama, 3-6 July 1861, and the second meeting was in Columbia, South Carolina, 16-24 October 1861. As senior bishop, Meade presided over the Convention in South Carolina where they drew up the constitution of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States.

Meade died on 14 March 1862, in Virginia.

From the guide to the William Meade Papers, 1807-1861., (Special Collections, College of William and Mary)