E.M. Bounds

After the battle, Franklin experienced revival when he preached & prayed

Washington Historical Museum, Washington, Ga.

E.M. Bounds who, at 29, was a chaplain at the Battle of Franklin in November 1864

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Franklin historian David Fraley voices his respect for E.M. Bounds as a Confederate chaplain

By Art Toalston

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E.M. Bounds may have been barefoot when he arrived at Franklin for what would become one of the Civil War’s most gruesome battles.

If so, the 29-year-old Confederate chaplain from Missouri was not alone. Dire shortages in supplies in 1864 had toughened a fourth or more of the Confederates to do without boots. As a minister, he may have given his to a soldier with an injured foot or ankle.

If, however, he had boots, it may have been at the respectful insistence of troops with whom the slender 5-foot, 5-inch chaplain had regularly faced the prospect of death.

These days, Bounds is known as an author whose writings on prayer – Power Through Prayer being the foremost – are still on bookstore shelves across the nation.

But a key chapter in Bounds’ life – yet one untouched by his own pen – began at the Battle of Franklin on Nov. 30, 1864.

He was wounded but was able to continue ministering in the heat of a five-hour battle pitting 29,000 ill-fated charging Confederates against 30,000 dug-in Union troops.

Bounds subsequently remained in Franklin to soothe the agonies of soldiers as they died or recovered from their wounds or amputations. The battle left 2,200 Confederates dead or mortally wounded and more than 5,000 injured, captured or missing. The Union death toll pushed toward 800, with 1,700 other casualties. Soldiers too battered to rejoin their regiments after the “Franklin holocaust,” as the late Civil War historian Shelby Foote termed it, “filled all the houses in the town, as well as every room in the courthouse, schools, and churches.”

After Bounds was taken into custody by Union troops and later released in Nashville, he returned to Franklin and became pastor of the depleted local Methodist church a few months later.

He also joined the effort to exhume, identify and rebury the Confederate dead from mass graves to a two-acre battlefield cemetery donated by the Carnton family from their farm.

Bounds began a weekly prayer meeting, initially with a half-dozen men from what is now First United Methodist Church. Lyle Wesley Dorsett, author of E.M. Bounds: Man of Prayer, recounted, “They got down on their knees together and prayed for revival – for themselves, the church, and the town.” Darrell D. King, author of a second biography, E.M. Bounds, wrote that the men edged “deeper into communion with God as they desperately prayed for revival.”

After more than a year of intercession, King wrote, “God opened the heavens and the fire of revival came to the little church in Franklin.” Nightly meetings continued for several weeks, with 150 people making public professions of their newfound faith in God.

In the fall of 1868, however, Methodist officials assigned Bounds to a church in Alabama, to the dismay of his Franklin flock.

An article in the Franklin Review lamented, “We but express the entire wish of this community when we say we wish it were possible he could return. No man ever gained such a hold upon any community as he, and the prayers and good wishes of the entire town will follow him wherever he may go. … The pious life and conversation of Mr. Bounds has been of incalculable benefit to this community, and we know he will prove a blessing wherever he goes. To the members of the church to which he is sent we will say, that the goodness of Providence has never been more benignly manifested towards you than when this eminently pious minister was called to your midst.”

The biographies by Dorsett in 1991 and King in 1998, while setting forth Bounds’ spiritual fervor, at times are out of sync with each other regarding various details of his life.

Bounds’ injuries at Franklin, for example, were inflicted by a saber-wielding Union soldier who left the chaplain with a fractured skull, lacerated forehead and broken arm, recounts David Fraley, assistant curator and staff historian at the Carter House museum and site of some of the battle’s heaviest bloodshed near downtown Franklin.

The laceration likely required horsehair sutures, Fraley says, surmising that Bounds’ arm probably was broken when he tried to deflect the saber blow. Otherwise, Bounds’ injuries didn’t incapacitate him, Fraley says.

King described the saber swipe as “shallow but it bled profusely” and, after a time, Bounds “regained his senses.” But King made no mention of a broken arm.

Dorsett did not mention any injury to Bounds during the battle.

Dorsett, but not King, pointed out that Bounds had two older brothers who fought for the Union.

Both authors recounted, in various ways, that Bounds was arrested by federal forces in Brunswick, Mo., in 1861. When he was targeted as a suspected southern sympathizer as a pastor in the Methodist Episcopal Church South denomination that had broken from northern Methodists in 1845, Bounds refused to compromise his ministerial integrity by signing a political loyalty oath to the government, King wrote. Dorsett, however, recounted only that Bounds was arrested for protesting the Union occupation of a Methodist Episcopal South church building.

Bounds was imprisoned for more than a year, often in harsh, cramped conditions, first in Jefferson City then in St. Louis, before being ordered to leave the state. He was transported to Memphis for release and trekked south where he met up with a Missouri infantry regiment in Port Gibson, Miss., and enlisted as a chaplain. He was in the ranks at the siege of Vicksburg and when Confederate troops retreated from Sherman’s march through the South.

Bounds had entered the ministry in 1859, closing a law office he had opened five years earlier after passing the bar two months before his 19th birthday.

“The details are lost to history,” Dorsett wrote, “but apparently … Bounds felt overwhelmed by God’s grace in a new and profound way. He surrendered his will to Christ and experienced a keen sense of the Holy Spirit’s presence. In the wake of this second blessing he experienced power to tell others about Christ’s love for all people, and he knew that God was calling him to a full-time preaching and evangelism ministry.”

Typical of many who witness the horrors of war, Bounds never dwelt on his experiences, though he attended Confederate reunions, corresponded with the men whom he had served and, until the day he died, carried a list in his wallet of the 130 Missourians whose reburials he had supervised at the Carnton cemetery in Franklin.

Bounds felt the provision of a proper resting place for the fallen Confederates “was truly directed by God” compared to the makeshift graves where their bodies were placed after the battle, King wrote. “Often he would stand on the hallowed ground that entombed his fellow soldiers, and tears would stream down his face as his lips moved with prayers for their grieving families.”

The Confederacy was a better match for Bounds’ temperament than the Union, Fraley of the Carter House proposes. The war likely deepened his grasp of the spiritual truth that “when you’re at your weakest, biblically speaking, you can be sure that you will see God at his greatest.”

“Had he been a federal officer who never went without food, who never marched barefoot, who was regularly paid, who knew his family was safe [in the North], what cause would such a man have to cry out to God as much as a humble, starving, barefoot, underdog Confederate chaplain have? …

“From a human perspective,” Fraley continues, “I don’t ever see a federal soldier having a need to cry out for something as simple as a blanket or a warm pair of shoes and socks or a decent meal.

“For Confederates, however, it was a way of life, so I think inherently it was easier to be men of prayer, men of faith,” Fraley says. Apart from God, “They had nothing else. …

“Think of your own life: When were you closest to the Lord?” Fraley asks. “When things were going great or when things were going badly?”

Beyond the Battle of Franklin, Bounds continued to face junctures of sorrow and crisis in subsequent years. In one five-year span during the 1880s, illness took the lives of his wife Emmie, whom he married eight years after leaving Franklin, and one of their three children, 6-year-old Edward, and a 1-year-old son, Charley, by his second wife, Hattie.

Bounds transitioned from the pastorate in Alabama and, later, St. Louis into the role of associate editor of The St. Louis Advocate in 1883, which also gave him evangelistic opportunities in churches to call sinners to redemption. In 1890, he became associate editor of the denomination-wide Christian Advocate based in Nashville. But he resigned in 1894, when the Methodist Episcopal Church South took a stance against the use of evangelists in the denomination’s churches. Having had the heart of an evangelist for nearly 40 years, from the pulpit and with his pen, his conscience could permit nothing else, even if it meant giving up a salary and future pension at age 59.

“A conscience enlightened by the Word of God and by His Spirit is like a sun, central and luminous. It guides, warms, and gladdens,” Bounds wrote in his final article in the Advocate. “The Christian must have a pure, enlightened conscience; brave, generous, which acts with deliberation and in the fear of God, and supports actions with consistency and firmness.”

Bounds and his family moved to Washington, Ga., to live in the home of his wife’s father. He devoted himself to writing about prayer but, away from the denominational limelight, he received only periodic invitations to preach. Only two of his books had been published when, at 77, he died in 1913.

Bounds’ words often have appeared in compilations of great quotations. As examples:

— “Prayer is the greatest of all forces, because it honors God and brings him into active aid.”

— “… [N]o two things are more essential to a spirit-filled life than Bible-reading and secret prayer; no two things more helpful to growth in grace; to getting the largest joy out of a Christian life; toward establishing one in the ways of eternal peace. The neglect of these all-important duties presages leanness of soul, loss of joy, absence of peace, dryness of spirit, decay in all that pertains to spiritual life.”

— “Prayer, joined to the Word of God, hallows and makes sacred all God’s gifts. Prayer is not simply to get things from God, but to make those things holy, which already have been received from him. It is not merely to get a blessing, but also to be able to give a blessing. Prayer makes common things holy and secular things, sacred. It receives things from God with thanksgiving and hallows them with thankful hearts, and devoted service.”

But perhaps it was back in Franklin where the childhood memories of one of Bounds’ flock show the heavenward humanity that would unfold through his writings.

“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.”

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