Ellison Capers
Doctor of Divinity 1893
Ellison Capers was a Confederate Brigadier General and an enslaver; in the 1860 U.S. Federal Census Slave Schedules, Capers is listed as owning five people, four of them children ages 7-13. After receiving his honorary degree from Sewanee in 1893, he was a bishop of South Carolina and Chancellor of Sewanee from 1904-1908.
The paternalistic relationship enslavers supposedly had with "childlike, naïve" enslaved people is evidenced by descriptions of the Capers family's supposed relationship with the people they enslaved in a biography of Ellison Capers written by his son:
"[Enslaved people's] very faithfulness is but a reflex of the patriarchal care and affection with which the best interest of the slave in the Southern States were guarded and fostered by his "marster" and "mistus.”
“...With the Capers and Palmer families, as with the majority of the higher type of slave owners, the negroes were regarded in the light of dependents for whom the masters felt a moral responsibility.”
-Walter Branham Capers, The Soldier-Bishop, Ellison Capers