The Ledgers of St. Matthew's

About the Church

St. Matthew’s German Lutheran Church,
Charleston South Carolina

The Immigrant Community

In his 1996 University of South Carolina dissertation, “‘Hurrah für dies süsse, dies sonnige Leben’: The Anomaly of Charleston, South Carolina’s Antebellum German-America,” Michael Everette Bell was the first to examine comprehensively the nineteenth-century German community in Charleston. Thus not until 1996 was there a clear picture of how that ethnic community had been formed, or how German immigrants experienced life among the antebellum society of the South Carolina Lowcountry. The title of his work begs the question of just how sweet and sunny the immigrant’s life actually was, and the “anomaly” suggests that the Charleston context was different than what was to be found elsewhere.

The fact that Bell chose as his dissertation topic an analysis and description of the Charleston German community indicates that he was working in uncharted territory, indeed, that his work would present (primarily for the academic community) something that was still unknown just a few years before the turn of the twenty-first century. Had the dissertation not been primarily an academic exercise and submitted to a larger audience, it would have been a revelation to local history buffs, as well as to Charlestonians who could trace their origins back to those who emigrated from German lands.

Bell determined that the influx of immigrants to Charleston that started in the early 1830s met with little resistance from the native population, which had earlier accepted Germans into their midst, albeit fewer in number. This relatively homogeneous group of immigrants seemed more than willing to adopt the ways of the southern, coastal society taking them in. They appeared ready to join with the local population rather than set themselves apart in their own enclave to pursue their native ways. According to Bell, some two-thirds of them were from the state of Hanover, and many of them came from the same local area in the northwest corner of the state. 

The success of the Germans who had come to Charleston in the early 1830s helped set the stage for the wave of immigrants that would follow in their footsteps, so that by 1860, Charleston’s German community was well established within the host society. During the decade prior to the Civil War, it had successfully transitioned to become remarkably one with the Charleston community. The German immigrants had let themselves in, had uncharacteristically settled throughout the city rather than forming a distinct ethnic enclave, and had set about quietly to find their place in their newly adopted home. The Germans were regarded, for the most part, as industrious, well-behaved, economically stable, and independent. Their successes were in spite of the fact that they had entered a host society that was perpetually on edge; that continually felt threatened by a minority population that was difficult to control; that was mired in political debates over nullification, states’ rights, and political-party squabbles more and more oriented to regional differences. 

Andrea Mehrländer’s 2011 comprehensive study of the German communities in Charleston, Richmond, and New Orleans during the years of the Civil War1 provided further analysis of the Charleston ethnic community. Her work brought into the foreground many of the group’s more prominent members, emphasized the leadership roles they played in both the ethnic and host communities, and suggested that those individuals came in many ways to “represent” the entire community of Charleston’s Germans. More recently, in several chapters of my 2021 study, Charleston’s Germans: An Enduring Legacy, I described the lives of less prominent immigrant families and proposed that it was their stories that were representative of what was experienced by the majority of the North German immigrants who came to Charleston in the nineteenth century. The names of most, if not all, of the individuals cited in these studies can be found in the database.

North German Origins and Church History

As Bell indicated, the immigrant community was uniquely homogeneous, consisting predominantly of North Germans, a majority of them emigrating from villages, towns, or cities in the northwestern corner of what was at the time the Kingdom (after annexation by Prussia in 1866, Province) of Hanover, now the German State (Land) of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). The St. Matthew’s register of marriages, for example, indicates that more than a third of the bridal couples—either bride or groom, or both—claimed their origin in a locality in Hanover. Beyond the Hanoverians enumerated in the marriage register, the number of Germans from other northern states, e.g., Holstein, Oldenburg, or Mecklenburg, add substantively to the tally to lend credence to the claim that the ethnic community was largely of North German origin. 

A more significant marker of the ethnic community’s homogeneity derives from the fact that the vast majority of these immigrants were Lutherans. It was their founding of a “German Evangelical Lutheran Church” that set the ethnic community denominationally apart and defined it vis à vis the host community.

Without delving too deeply in post-Reformation church history, we can note that in 1817 King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia decreed the union of the Lutheran and Reformed (i.e., following Protestant reforms preached by  Zwingli and Calvin) churches within his territories into a single body, the Evangelical Church in Prussia, later known as the Prussian Union. This administrative and liturgical union effectively brought Lutheran and Reformed congregations under one church government. The administrative union, however, was controversial and resisted. While in Prussia and several other north German states, King Friedrich Wilhelm’s united “Evangelical” Church became the dominant Protestant body, pockets of confessionally strict, separatist Lutheranism persisted alongside it. 

Hanover would become a stronghold of separatism, staunchly opposed to the Prussian Union. After Prussia’s 1866 annexation of Hanover, the “Lutheran” Church remained the unmodified, un-unionized state Church. Charleston’s North German immigrants did not emigrate to America to escape a state-forced doctrinal merger of Lutheran and Calvinist-Reformed beliefs. Their Lutheran/confessional identity was an established one: they came from a place where “Lutheran” and “the Church” were synonymous, with no pressure from the state advocating something else. Other factors “pushing” emigration, such as land scarcity, primogeniture, population pressure, chain migration, or dreams of economic opportunity outweighed any sense of religious persecution as a cause of emigration.Fou

Founding St. Matthew’s

All accounts (including Wikipedia) of the history of St. Matthew’s acknowledge the leadership of Johann Andreas Wagener, a dynamic, well-meaning immigrant from the North German village of Sievern in the vicinity of Bremerhaven. In Charleston by 1833, he led a group of some fifty other immigrant men in founding the St. Matthew’s German Evangelical-Lutheran Church in 1840.

Reportedly,2 Wagener’s original intent was to establish a German-language, “ecumenical, cosmopolitan” congregation open to all—whether of Lutheran (strictly following the tenets of Martin Luther), Reformed (based on modifications to those tenets preached by Zwingli and Calvin), or Catholic (Papist) confession. When the ecumenical plan failed to take shape (most likely in recognition of sacramental and liturgical differences), under the leadership of Wagener and intent on being able to worship in their native language, a cohort of German Lutherans left the congregation of St. John’s Lutheran Church (founded earlier and by the early 1800s known as the “English Lutheran Church”) and organized their German Lutheran Church, opting for what they knew and were comfortable with: straightforward, unmodified confessional Lutheranism, with the liturgy, catechism, and communion practice of the churches they had left behind.

Being Lutheran in Charleston

When Wagener and other recently immigrated Germans organized the new St. Matthew’s congregation, they did not elect to found a “German Evangelical Church of Charleston,” but rather a specifically-denominated “German Evangelical Lutheran Church.” The Lutheran qualifier narrowed the meaning (Protestant, gospel-based, not-Catholic) of the old, Reformation-era term “evangelical,” and purposefully excluded Reformed doctrine, making it explicitly clear which confession within Protestantism they belonged to.3  The founders of St. Matthew’s were rejecting the ecumenical/unionist path (whether the Prussian-style merger or Wagener’s own initial cosmopolitan vision) in favor of unambiguous confessional Lutheranism. Encoding the “German Evangelical Lutheran” identity in the 1840 charter—was in essence using confessional distinctiveness—in addition to language—as a boundary-marker for the ethnic community’s liturgical and sacramental practices.

The denominational world St. Matthew’s German Lutherans would have to navigate socially and politically was one of an elite, established religious culture. During the post-Revolution years, Charleston continued to resonate with an entrenched, elite, high-church Episcopalian establishment, tempered only slightly by the founding of  the Circular Congregational Church in 1681 by English Congregationalists, Scotch and Irish Presbyterians, and French Huguenots, and the First Scots Presbyterian Church in 1731, both aligned with the Reformed-tradition. A substantial Jewish community was in place by 1800, lending Charleston a kind of three-pronged elite, long-established, religious landscape.

At the same time, however, the Second Great Awakening was taking hold throughout much of American Protestantism, including in the urban South. Early Baptist and independent African-American congregations were formed in urban centers, and Methodism was expanding in more rural areas through camp-meeting revivalism, itinerant preaching, and a conversion-centered theology of individual religious experience. We can think of Charleston’s religious culture in the 1840s as a layering of  an older, socially dominant Episcopalian/Huguenot-Presbyterian elite with liturgical and Reformed roots, mixed with a growing evangelical/revivalist Baptist and Methodist presence—strongest among poorer whites and, notably, among the city’s large free and enslaved Black population.4

The German Lutheran sacramental/liturgical worship did not fit  cleanly into either of these “native” traditions: Episcopalianism was based on a different theology of the sacraments and different national/ethnic and social-class associations and was tied to the old planter and merchant elite;  Baptist/Methodist revivalist evangelicalism was based on different liturgical form, different theology of conversion and the sacraments, different social class and often different racial composition. Lutheranism was liturgically formal like Episcopalianism, but doctrinally and ethnically distinct from it, and sacramentally “high” in a way starkly different from Baptist/Methodist practice. Thus Charleston’s German Lutherans occupied a genuinely distinct niche in the city’s religious ecology. Theological and linguistic differences would hold the ethnic community together until the process of acculturation would enable it to merge with the host society. 

The Built Church

In 1967, a “history of St. Matthew’s, based on the official records of the congregation” was prepared by Winnie J.M. Butt, a member of the congregation, in celebration of the church’s founding.5 “125 years ago, in the city of Charleston, many earnest Lutherans were anxious to hear the gospel preached in their native tongue. Filled with determination and zeal, with courage and power and with a great devotion to a loyal Christian ideal, these our forefathers set about planting this our glorious church, which we cherish so highly today.” 

After the Civil War, the congregation outgrew its original sanctuary on the corner of Hasell and Anson Streets (dedicated in 1842) and purchased property on King Street in 1868 to erect a new church. In 1872, the new church, “an imposing structure…built under the direction of Mr. J.H. Devereux, Architect, without the loss of a life” was dedicated on Holy Thursday, March 28, with “elaborate ceremonies, there being 3000 present, with the street crowded outside.”

The Charleston Courier devoted full page coverage to the “German Church” the following day (Friday, March 29, 1872): several excerpts suffice to express the congregation’s and the city’s enthusiasm with what had been accomplished:

  • The new German Church–the spire of which points high above all other church spires in the city, is an ornament to the city and at once a lasting monument of the skill of the architect and the indomitable perseverance and energy of our German fellow-citizens.
  • The sanctuary is a handsome work of art. The arch spanning the opening is 25 ft. across and carved on clustered columns. It rises to an elevation of 64 feet in imitation of stone. Over the altar is one of the most exquisitely finished ceilings in the country. It is ribbed and groin-arched and its panels of azure blue are delicately studded with stars. The light is admitted through an immense window of stained glass, representing in the center “The Crucifiction” and on either side, certain portraits of sacred characters.
  • The whole edifice is worthy of the people who first conceived it, the genius that carried it out and as long as time shall permit it to stand, it will be a monument of German energy and zeal.6

The more current Wikipedia description of the building acknowledges that the structure “is most known for the height of its steeple.” Until the early 1970s, St. Matthew’s was considered the tallest building in South Carolina. It remains the tallest church steeple in the state. By whatever measure it distinguishes itself, the St. Matthew’s German Lutheran Church stands as a permanent “ornament” of Charleston, a “gift” to the city by a nineteenth-century community of German immigrants who intended to, and did, become Charlestonians.

Notes

  1. Berlin/New York: DeGruyter, 2011. ↩︎
  2. “Wikipedia: St. Matthew’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church,” accessed August 23, 2026. ↩︎
  3. It is worth noting that this naming convention—”Evangelical Lutheran Church”—is reflected in the designation of one of the branches of modern American Lutheranism—the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America). ↩︎
  4. Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church was founded in 1816–17. ↩︎
  5. Winnie M. Butt, To the Glory of God and in memory of His abiding presence for one hundred, twenty-five years: St Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Charleston, South Carolina, 1967. ↩︎
  6. Quotations and newspaper excerpts from Butt [unpaginated]. ↩︎