An Episcopal priest at St. George’s Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the Rev. Randolph evacuated the town with his family when U.S. troops laid siege in November 1862. According to a 1912 history redolent with Lost Cause sentiments, Randolph, “being thus without a parish became a chaplain in the [Confederate] army, displaying the most devoted, single-minded courage and zeal on the battlefield among the wounded, under the fire of the enemy, and in the sorer trials of ministering in the crowded field and post hospitals.” More than a year prior to evacuation, he had delivered a sermon rallying parishioners to the Christian purposes of the southern nation, republished as “Address on the Day of Fasting and Prayer Appointed by the President of the Confederate States, June 13, 1861.”

Let a calm confidence in the justice of God take the place of vain boasting, and the excitement of rumors. Let humbleness for our personal and national sins renew our strength for national and personal trials. Let us go from our closets to our posts of duty, and make our patriotism pure and fervent by prayer. It is an inspiring sentence which opens the book of our national history, this day of fasting and supplication. Like the first morning prayer before the toil and the temptation of the day; like the baptism of the child into the christian soldiership “against sin, the world and the devil,” so we bring our new born nation to the temple of Jehovah to baptize it to-day with our christian faith, to consecrate it to Christ and his cause, to truth, liberty and justice, and to invoke upon its rules, its people, and its Constitution, the benediction of the King of kings.

Randolph’s father was an enslaver who owned at least 70 people. Randolph became the first bishop of the new Diocese of Southern Virginia in 1892 and was awarded his honorary degree in 1902.

1840 U.S. Federal Census, Fauquier County, Hamilton; 1850 U.S. Federal Census, Fauquier County, Turner's Slave Schedule.

https://history.churchsp.org/the-earliest-rector-photographs/

“Address on the Day of Fasting and Prayer Appointed by the President of the Confederate States, June 13, 1861.” https://history.churchsp.org/wp-content/uploads/dayoffastingandprayer1861.pdf