by Keith Bassham
Edward McKendree Bounds, or as he is known to most of us, E. M. Bounds, is well known among most Christian readers for his books on prayer. What most people do not know is how he came to serve as a chaplain during the Civil War.
Mr. Bounds was born in Shelby County in northeastern Missouri in 1835. He appears to have been named after famed circuit rider and Methodist bishop William McKendree. As so many future preachers did in those days, he prepared himself to practice law at first, but not before giving in to a little gold fever in California. Alas, he and his brother found no riches, and so he returned to Missouri where he was admitted to the bar as one of the youngest lawyers in the state.
By that time, The Great Awakening of 1857-1858 had reached the Midwest, and Edward responded to God’s call. He was ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church South and began riding an evangelistic circuit much as his namesake had.
As a border state, the lines between the Federals and the Confederates in Missouri shifted often, and civilians were sometimes caught in the crossfire. In 1861, while pastoring in Brunswick, MO, Edward was suspected of Southern sympathy (this would have been assumed, given that his denomination had split from Northern Methodists in 1845, roughly the same time as the Baptists, though Bounds was not known to be an advocate of slavery himself). Biographers differ on the exact order of events over the next several months. One believes Bounds protested the Union occupation of a church building. Others say he believed the Union’s demands to sign an oath of allegiance to be unwarranted, and so he refused to sign. Whatever the reason, along with more than 240 others, he was arrested and imprisoned, first in Jefferson City, and later St. Louis. Ordered out of the state, he was released in a prisoner exchange camp in the South. He could have sought a revocation of his banishment (others had done so in similar circumstances), but he simply did in the South what he had been doing in northeast Missouri — traveling and preaching the Gospel. In February, 1863, he found Sterling Price’s army in Mississippi and joined the Confederate Army, serving the remainder of the war as a chaplain.
Bounds served bravely alongside his men in several campaigns — Vicksburg among them — that went badly for the Confederate troops. In Franklin, TN, November, 1864, he and his men suffered an unbelievable number of casualties in one of the last major offensives launched by the Confederates. Bounds, himself suffering a head injury from a saber, was captured by Union troops on the field while he attempted to minister to the wounded, he once again found himself a prisoner of war. He ministered to the wounded and dying in the prison as best he could, and in June 1865, after hostilities were concluded, he pledged allegiance once again to the United States of America.
After his release, he returned to Missouri, but he was drawn back to Franklin, TN. With hatred of the Federal soldiers still hanging in the air, he became pastor of the Methodist Church, which he found “in a wretched state.” After taking to himself a number of men who joined in extended times of prayer, the church experienced a revival and an outpouring of the Spirit of God as large numbers of people were saved.
He went on to pastor other churches and to do evangelistic work, and even ventured into writing. He assisted in editing The St. Louis Advocate in 1883, and later the denomination-wide Christian Advocate with offices in Nashville. However, when the AME Church South discouraged churches from using evangelists, he felt he had to resign the denominational position.
He moved to Georgia, where he gave himself to prayer and to books about prayer, only two of which had been published by the time of his death in 1913 at the age of 77. He spoke rarely of his war experiences, but those times and the personal tragedies he experienced afterward (I have no room for details here) must have shaped his activities the last 15 years or so of his life.
We can forgive ourselves if we have used and referred to Mr. Bounds’s materials without full knowledge of his experience. Sometimes, though, just as we are ignorant of important pieces of our history, we sometimes leave legacies we know nothing of this side of the grave. Baptist journalist Art Toalston reports the effect Bounds had on another Methodist leader, probably unknown to Bounds himself.
“When I was only a lad,” the former president of Kentucky’s Asbury College, B.F. Haynes, wrote some 45 years later, “there came to Franklin, Tennessee, where we lived, as pastor of our church, the Reverend E.M. Bounds whose preaching and life did more to mold and settle my character and experience than any pastor I ever had. His preaching profoundly impressed me, his prayers linger until today, as one of the holiest and sweetest memories of my life, his reading of hymns was simply inimitable. Nothing was sweeter, tenderer, or more enrapturing to my young heart and mind than the impressive, unctuous reading of the old Wesleyan hymns by this young pastor … in a spirit, tone and manner that simply poured life, hope, peace and holy longings into my boyish heart.”
After his death, friends and admirers of the old prayer warrior gathered his documents and published six more volumes on prayer based on those manuscripts. Hardly a preacher I know teaches or preaches on the subject without quoting E. M. Bounds, a great Civil War Chaplain.
Note: This article is a revision of an earlier article published in the Tribune.