Jeremiah Bell Jeter

Jeremiah Bell Jeter (18 July 1802–18 February 1880) was a leading Southern Baptist pastor, editor, polemicist, and denominational organizer. His career ran from itinerant missionary work in western Virginia through long Richmond pastorates, a central role in the 1845 formation of the Southern Baptist Convention, and late-life editorship of the Religious Herald. In 1872–73 the Foreign Mission Board sent him to Italy as special commissioner to rescue a collapsing new mission in Rome.

Born in Bedford County, Virginia, to Pleasant Jeter and Jane Eke Hatcher, he grew up in a respectable but financially unstable household that moved often. Enslaved people were present as nurses and companions. Formal schooling was fragmentary. Converted in 1821 with his friend Daniel Witt, he was baptized that December and began preaching almost immediately. In 1823 the two men became the first missionaries of the Baptist General Association of Virginia. Jeter was ordained 4 May 1824.

After early pastorates he served Morattico and Wicomico churches on the Northern Neck (1828–1835), baptizing about a thousand people. From 1836 to 1849 he was pastor of First Baptist Church, Richmond. He oversaw the 1841 division that produced an all-white First Baptist Church and the First African Baptist Church. A three-year pastorate at Second Baptist, St. Louis (1849–1852), was followed by Grace Street Baptist Church in Richmond (1852–1870). Around 1865 he became senior editor of the Religious Herald, which he helped make one of the most influential Baptist papers in the country.

He was a principal organizer of the 1845 Southern Baptist Convention, formed after Northern Baptists refused to appoint slaveholding missionaries, and first president of its Foreign Mission Board. He also chaired the Richmond College trustees and served as a trustee of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His books include memoirs of Andrew Broaddus, Daniel Witt, and Henrietta Shuck, anti-Campbellite treatises, and Baptist Principles Reset. He married four times, through one of which he he came to own slaves; later scholarship has documented his defense of slavery and postwar racial hierarchy. He died in Richmond on 18 February 1880 and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery.

Southern Baptist activity in Italy increased markedly following the capture of Rome on 20 September 1870, which ended papal temporal power and made Protestant work legally possible. In February 1870 Franklin Wilson urged the American Baptist Publication Society to supply literature for Italy and other European fields. James B. Taylor, corresponding secretary of the Foreign Mission Board, called Italy “the best place for a new mission.” Wilson recommended William Nelson Cote (1839–1877), former secretary of the YMCA of France and son of a worker with Madame Feller’s Grand Ligne Mission in Canada. On 18 June 1870 the Board appointed Cote to start work in southern Europe (Marseilles, Milan, Chambéry, or another suitable point). Cote chose Italy. By March 1871 he reported a church of eighteen members in Rome.

On 12 March 1872 Giovanni B. Gioja, a thirty-four-year-old convert, was baptized in the Tiber and ordained the following Sunday. He was left as pastor while Cote returned to the United States for two months (April–June 1872). When Cote came back, his wife Amanda accused Gioja of licentious conduct toward her. Gioja denied the charge, accused Amanda Cote of attempting to seduce him, and published his defense in two Roman newspapers (La capitale, no. 893, 1873; The Swiss Times, no. 563, 1873) and in a pamphlet, A Circulating Vindication by Prof. G. B. Gioja, the First Legitimate Pastor of the First Baptist Church at Trastevere (Rome: Tipografia Mugnoz, 19 June 1873). Catholic papers used the scandal against the Protestants.

On 21 June 1872 the Foreign Mission Board appointed Jeter special commissioner to settle the dispute and simultaneously recorded the “indispensableness for an American missionary on whose piety, discretion, ability, and business-qualifications the Board can implicitly rely.” Jeter, then seventy, spoke no Italian and had never been to Europe; the summons surprised and embarrassed him. After time in England he reached Rome in November 1872. He found “disastrous strife” that went beyond a simple rupture of relations. His biographer William E. Hatcher later called Gioja “a man of immense cunning and malignity.” Jeter wrote that he had “never found myself more painfully perplexed than I have been in regard to the matters of the Rome church.”

In January 1873, after investigation, Jeter recommended that Gioja be dismissed and that Cote withdraw. A declaration supporting Cote, signed by Italian workers Amedeo Basile (Bari), Paolo Gardiol (Rome), L. Mollo (Civitavecchia), Gaetano Giannini (Bologna), Francesco Martinelli (Modena and Carpi), and Onorato Ferraris (Torre Pellice), did not change the Board’s decision. Cote resigned. Paolo Gardiol, evangelist at Civitavecchia, wrote Jeter on 24 May 1873 that he felt “obliged to separate from the Committee” because he could not “tolerate that such a great injustice be made to our dear brother Nelson Cote.” Jeter also examined properties for a chapel; funds already raised (more than $22,000, mostly from the postwar South) proved sufficient only for a lot. He left Rome for Geneva when he believed legal action against him was being prepared, and he returned to Richmond in June 1873 still “painfully perplexed.”

That summer the Board replaced Cote with George Boardman Taylor (1832–1907). Taylor, his wife Susan Spottswood Braxton, and their four children sailed from New York on 18 June 1873 on the Anchor Line Columbia for Glasgow, then Rome. The Board praised Taylor’s “practical sagacity, broad cultivation, elevated character, and missionary spirit.” Italian historian Giorgio Spini later wrote that Taylor found the work “in a semi-bankruptcy state” and, within a few years, gave it “dignified stability.” Taylor remained thirty-four years, extending the mission from Rome to Civitavecchia, Albano, Viterbo, Tivoli, Velletri, and, in 1873, Milan through Oscar Cocorda, a former Waldensian pastor. Jeter’s brief commission thus closed the first, crisis-ridden phase of Southern Baptist work in Italy and opened the longer Taylor era.

Primary and near-contemporary sources in 'The Italian Baptist Crisis':

Gardiol, Paolo. Letter to J. B. Jeter, Rome, 24 May 1873. William Nelson Cote Collection (1873–1874), AR 551-2, Box 14, Foreign Mission Board Missionary Correspondence. Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives (SBHLA), Nashville.

Gioja, G. B. A Circulating Vindication by Prof. G. B. Gioja, the First Legitimate Pastor of the First Baptist Church at Trastevere in His Native City Rome. Rome: Tipografia Mugnoz, 19 June 1873.

Hatcher, William E. Life of J. B. Jeter, D.D. Baltimore: H. M. Wharton and Company, 1887. 

Jeter, Jeremiah Bell. The Recollections of a Long Life. With introduction by J. L. M. Curry. Richmond, VA: The Religious Herald Co., 1891. 

La capitale: gazzetta di Roma, no. 893 (1873); The Swiss Times, no. 563 (1873). 

Taylor, George Braxton. Life and Letters of the Rev. George Boardman Taylor, D.D. Lynchburg, VA: J. P. Bell Company, 1908. 

Taylor, George Braxton. Southern Baptists in Sunny Italy. New York: Walter Neale, 1929. 

Tupper, H. A. The Foreign Missions of the Southern Baptist Convention. Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society; Richmond: Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1880. 

Secondary Sources

Anderson, Fred. “Roma: Virginia Baptists on Tour.” Baptist News Global, 12 June 2005. 

Anderson, Fred. “Baptist Apostles.” Baptist News Global, 14 June 2005. 

Anderson, Fred. “Adventures of a Church Planter”; “Showing Courage”; “Imagining the Future.” Baptist News Global, 2007. 

Hervey, G. Winfred. The Story of Baptist Missions in Foreign Lands, from the Time of Carey to the Present Date. Centennial edition. St. Louis: C. R. Barns Publishing Co., 1892. Pp. 830–831 

Hutchinson, Mark P., Daniela Saresella, and Paolo Zanini, eds. A Global History of Italian Protestantism. Vol. 2, From the Napoleonic Wars to the Present. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2026. 

Paschetto, Lodovico, and Enrico Paschetto. They of Italy. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1930. 

Spini, Giorgio. Italia Liberale e Protestanti. Turin: Claudiana, 2002. 

Straub, Jeffrey P. “Baptists, Jeremiah Bell Jeter, and ‘The Blighting, Withering Curse.’” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 25 (2020): 97–118. 

Taylor, George Braxton. Virginia Baptist Ministers. 3rd series. Lynchburg, VA: J. B. Bell, 1912. 

University of Richmond. “Jeremiah Bell Jeter” and “Jeremiah Bell Jeter, Enslavement and Race.” An Unfolding History. https://unfoldinghistory.richmond.edu/. 

Weaver, C. Douglas. “Jeter, Jeremiah Bell (1802–1880).” American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; online 2000. https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.0800759.

“Jeremiah Bell Jeter.” The Reformed Reader. https://www.reformedreader.org/. Used for conversion, baptism totals, pastorates, books, and editorship.