Joseph Sylvester Lame

NOTE: In 2011 Laura M. DiPaolo wrote an exhaustive history of the Methodist Ministers’ burial ground, Section 131 at Mount Moriah. “God’s Forgotten Acre” was published in the Journal of the Historical Society of the EPA Conference (Eastern Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church). As part of that document, this is the life story she wrote of one of the church’s notable ministers in Philadelphia.

Described as a ministerial star “of more than ordinary moral luster,” Joseph S. Lame was born in Philadelphia on September 17, 1832, and was brought to Christ at the Kensington ME [Methodist Episcopal] Church under the ministry of Rev. Alfred Cookman. Lame joined the Philadelphia Conference in 1853, first serving on the Radnor circuit, in Delaware County. He was ordained a deacon in 1855 and an elder in 1857.

In 1856, Lame was appointed to Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore, where pro-slavery sentiment ran high. He later admitted that he did not then have clear views on slavery, even leaning somewhat toward seeing it as morally acceptable. First hand experience of slavery’s brutality, however, turned him against the “peculiar institution:”

The more minutely we watched the practical operations and developments of the [slave] system, the more fully we became settled in the conclusion that such a system is utterly repugnant to the teachings of the Bible. And such were the abominations of the traffic, as practiced by church members and ministers, professors and publicans, that we were driven to the admission that… the American is the worst system of slavery that ever saw the sun.

In 1857, after his appointment to the Snow Hill Circuit in southern Maryland, Lame began writing letters under the pseudonym “Junius,” exposing slaveholding among eastern shore Methodists, and describing the injustices he saw. The letters were published in Zion’s Herald, a Methodist anti-slavery paper in Boston, provoking locals to see to uncover the identity of the undercover correspondent.

At the 1858 session of the Philadelphia Conference, held in Easton, Pennsylvania, Lame was a visible supporter of Rev. John D. Long, who was on trial for publishing a similar expose of Methodist slaveholders on the Shore. As a consequence, Lame’s identity as “Junius” was revealed not long after his return to Snow Hill. Lame, his wife, and young son soon were forced to flee the area for their own safety. Later that year, he published a book entitled, Maryland Slavery and Maryland Chivalry, which included his “Junius” letters and an account of his expulsion from his circuit.

During the Civil War, Lame volunteered to serve as a chaplain in the 93rd Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment, which was raised largely in Lebanon County. He was recruited by the 93rd’s commander, Colonel James M. McCarter, a conference colleague and fellow abolitionist minister turned field officer.

Lame served from October 1862 until the end of the war, and was recalled as an effective minister to the troops, “steadily laboring for their mental improvement, social entertainment, and spiritual welfare. A successful literary society, revival services when opportunities afforded, and particularly a rude chapel erected in front of Petersburg, Virginia, in which… a number of soldiers were converted, bore witness to his diligence and fidelity as an army chaplain.”

After the war, Lame returned to the Philadelphia Conference, and shepherded churches for the next 40 years before ill health compelled his retirement in the spring of 1895; he died on December 15 of the same year. Lame was remembered as a “pastor of the thoroughly evangelistic type… not forgetting to call sinners personally to repentance.”

He was also known to be faithful and somewhat colorful in pastoral visitation: “It was a habit with him to visit literally from house to house, tract in pocket and hand, singing a hymn and offering prayer, extending courteous counsel and admonition.”

Lame was married to Hannah Thompson, sister of the Rev. John Thompson, and the couple had three children, two of whom predeceased their parents. The entire family is buried beneath a large obelisk in the Ministers’ Burial Ground at Mount Moriah. According to a colleague, Joseph Lame was one of the “heroes” of the Philadelphia Conference, who had “forever secured a place among the Immortals.”

(The lower inscription reads, “An alabaster of precious ointment broken for the Master’s use”)