[for the Richmond Dispatch.]
Rev. Mr. Pinkney.
Huntsville, June 7, 1861.
Mr. Editor: The statement that the Rev. Mr. Pinkney, of the Church of Ascension, District of Columbia, was elected Bishop of this Diocese at our late Convention, continues to be repeated both in Church and Northern secular papers.
Will you permit me thus formally to assert in your columns that this report is wholly untrue?
Mr. Pinkney was chosen by a small majority of the clergy, but the nomination was almost unanimously rejected by the Laity.
Several papers, such as the National Intelligencer and the New York Evening Express, seem to feel an unusual interest in this supposed action of our Diocese just at this time. It may be well, therefore, to state one of the controlling reasons that demanded this rejection: Although Dr. Pinkney himself alone considered, was regarded as unexceptionable, yet the Convention could not consent to select a Bishop from a region so near the headquarters of the tyrants at Washington.
With perfect confidence in Dr. Pinkney as a Christian and a man of talents, the Convention was still not willing to afford the least ground for the supposition that the Church in this State could just now look to Washington for anything but the bitterest enmity to all the institutions of the South, both political and ecclesiastical.
Yes, we were unwilling for any one north of Mason and Dixon's line even weakly to infer from such an act that the same stern sense of injury and oppression which now rules every true Southern heart had failed to secure its rightful reign amid the calm, the secluded, the sacred enclosures of the Episcopal Church of the South.
We hold that this fact plainly shows how unanimously the people of these States are bent on living freemen, or on resolutely suffering that extermination with which their Northern enemies threaten them. 