The Pastor Who Almost Became President

Recovering a Lost Vision of Christian Political Engagement

Imagine an America where Andrew Johnson never ascended to the presidency—where, instead of the bitter and divisive battles between the White House and Congress, the nation was led through Reconstruction by a statesman-pastor who saw righteousness as the true foundation of national renewal. According to a widely repeated legend, that nearly happened.

By many reports, General Green Clay Smith, a Kentucky congressman and war hero, came within a single vote of becoming Abraham Lincoln’s running mate at the 1864 Republican National Convention—an outcome that, had it gone the other way, would have made him president of the United States. 

According to the story, told and retold for decades, when the votes for the Vice Presidential nominee were tallied, the result was a deadlock. The chairman, compelled to break the tie, cast the decisive vote for Johnson. The rest is history. Johnson ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, overseeing a turbulent Reconstruction era defined by bitter conflicts with Congress. Smith, on the other hand, would leave politics for the pulpit, believing that the true preservation of the nation rested not in political maneuvering but in the moral and spiritual renewal of its people. 

Though widely circulated in Washington, DC through the end of the nineteenth century, a closer look at the convention’s official minutes reveals that Smith was never actually a contender for the nomination at all. But it still begs the question: what if, instead of Johnson, America had been led through its defining postwar years by a statesman who believed, as Smith did, that “the Word of God is the foundation of all that is good in human laws”? What if the man who almost became president had, in fact, shaped the moral and political destiny of a divided nation? 

From War Hero to Pastor

Born in 1826, Smith hailed from Kentucky’s famed Clay family, a lineage steeped in American politics. His uncle, Cassius M. Clay, was a prominent abolitionist and diplomat, and he married Lena Duke, the niece of Chief Justice John Marshall. A veteran of the Mexican-American War, Smith later commanded Union forces as a brigadier general during the Civil War. After serving in Congress, he was appointed territorial governor of Montana. Yet, despite his prestigious political career, Smith stunned friends and colleagues in 1869 when he renounced public office to become a Baptist minister.

Smith was not merely trading one platform for another—he believed his new calling was a continuation of his duty to shape American society according to biblical principles. Over the next two decades, he pastored churches across Kentucky, preaching with an oratorical skill that once earned him the title of “the most engaging speaker of his time” in Congress. A friend later recalled, “Where he had often before been heard as a lawyer, politician, and warrior, he was now heard as a preacher of the gospel.” He became a leading voice in the temperance movement and served for nine consecutive years as moderator of the Kentucky Baptist General Association. 

A Return to Washington—Not to Govern, but to Preach

In 1890, Washington, D.C. welcomed Smith back—not as a lawmaker, but as the pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church (now Capitol Hill Baptist Church). The Washington Post ran an article titled “From Politics to Preaching,” marveling at the return of a national figure to a local pulpit. Church Clerk Francis McLean jubilantly recorded in the minutes: “Ring the bells! Ring the change! We have a leader of national reputation.”

Smith’s return to the nation’s capital was not an abdication of political engagement but a redirection of it. He believed the church was to be the conscience of the nation, shaping law and culture in alignment with divine truth. For him, the idea that law and governance could be divorced from the influence of religion was both irrational and dangerous. “The Word of God,” he proclaimed in his inaugural sermon at Metropolitan Baptist Church, “is the foundation of all that is good in human laws.” 

By the time Green Clay Smith took the pastorate in the nation’s capital in 1890, America stood at a crossroads of unprecedented progress and unsettling moral upheaval. The era brimmed with technological advancements—transcontinental railroads, mechanized industry, and an expanding national economy—yet these material gains were accompanied by social and cultural instability. Washington, D.C., like much of the nation, was growing at a breakneck pace, its population swelling beyond the limits of its infrastructure, giving rise to overcrowded tenements, poverty, crime, and disease. 

Meanwhile, the traditional moral order, once rooted in tight-knit Protestant communities, was being challenged by rapid urbanization, waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants, and the creeping influence of secularism. “The growing thoughtlessness, irreverence for sacred things,” lamented Benjamin F. Bingham, a Sunday School leader at Metropolitan Baptist Church, “should prompt us to inquire into causes and look about for remedies.” 

To many conservative evangelicals, the old moral certainties seemed to be dissolving amid Sabbath-breaking, alcohol abuse, and a culture increasingly shaped by entertainment and indulgence rather than discipline and duty. As one observer put it, the spirit of the age was animated more by the pursuit of “money and power” than by the virtues that had once defined the republic. 

Yet rather than retreat into reactionary despair, leaders like Smith embraced what historian George Marsden has called “innovative conservatism,” leveraging civic organizations, churches, and political influence to push back against the moral drift of the era. 

Smith stepped into this role with clarity of conviction, determined to wield the pulpit as a platform for national renewal. At a time when Washington was rife with political corruption and American cities were grappling with crime, poverty, and the erosion of traditional Christian values, Smith saw a nation in desperate need of reformation. To him, the debate was not merely about politics but about whether America would remain a God-fearing nation at all. The answer, he believed, lay in a return to the “foundation of righteousness upon which true freedom rests.”​

As a Baptist minister and a former statesman, he saw Christianity as the indispensable moral force shaping not only individual character but also the destiny of nations. “We put a penalty on our statute books for murder,” he explained, “but it was God who said: ‘Thou shalt not commit murder.’” The law of God was not merely a private religious conviction; it was the very cornerstone upon which just government stood.

Smith warned in his preaching of the rise of secular liberalism, which sought to replace God’s Word as the foundation of laws with moral relativism. In a sermon delivered in January 1893, he condemned the growing trends sweeping intellectual circles in Europe and the United States, singling out the positivist philosophies of August Comte and Herbert Spencer as particularly dangerous. The so-called liberalism of the day, he argued, was nothing more than an excuse for moral decay. “What is called liberalism,” he warned, “is the most illiberal position to assume.” It was, in his words, a philosophy that:

“Is personal, individual, and selfish—leads to revolution, anarchy, and despotism. It breaks up churches, overrides the Sabbath, enslaves mankind, and destroys the religion of Christ.”​

For Smith, true civilization could not be sustained without religion. Christianity was not merely an aspect of American identity—it was the very force that preserved the republic from decay. He saw the encroachments of secularism, materialism, and moral relativism as existential threats to national survival. A nation that refused to acknowledge God, he argued, was a nation on the path to destruction.

Smith’s call to action was clear. Christians could not afford to retreat from public life. They had a duty to shape the laws of the nation according to God’s commandments. Anything less, he insisted, was disobedience to the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor. “Christianity alone,” he declared, “carried the dual capacity of ‘influence for good in this life, and it only procured the happiness mankind yearned for in the life to come.’ It should be carried into every calling among men and into the halls of legislation.” To remove Christianity from government and law, in his view, was to invite moral chaos​. 

The opposite of chaos, in Smith’s understanding, was freedom, not the libertarian notion of absolute autonomy but rather the disciplined obedience to moral law. “Be careful how you demand individual liberty to the detriment of society and religion,” he warned​. Without the guiding force of Christian morality, personal freedom would inevitably devolve into self-destruction. True liberty, he insisted, was “the spirit-wrought, moral ability to submit to God’s law.” Any attempt to redefine freedom apart from moral law was doomed to failure.

Smith’s convictions about the role of Christianity in public life were unapologetically robust. He saw America as a nation uniquely tasked with spreading Christianity and ordered liberty to the world. In an 1892 sermon, he proclaimed, “To plant the gospel in all the dark spots of the earth, to be the great chandelier hung out between heaven and earth to give light unto the nations of the world and make them Republican and Christian and free.”

Such a future, however, was far from inevitable. Smith saw the rise and fall of civilizations through the lens of morality and judgment. The great empires of Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, he argued, had collapsed not simply because of economic decline or military defeat, but because they had abandoned moral and religious order. “Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome—every nation has fallen because of corruption. God has warned us by the examples of the past.”​ America would share their fate if it abandoned biblical principles. Would it heed the warnings of history and uphold its Christian foundations, or would it embrace the decadence that had doomed civilizations before it? 

Recovering a Christian Vision for Politics Today

Smith’s vision for Christian political engagement has largely been abandoned in modern discourse. Many churches have accepted the secularist claim that biblical morality has no place in shaping law and public life. Smith would have seen this as a tragic capitulation. As his life and writings indicate, Smith did not see the church as a bystander to national affairs. He viewed it as an active force in shaping society, particularly through moral reform. He understood that every law reflects a moral foundation—either God’s law or man’s rebellion against it.

The great question for the church today is this: Will we recover a vision for Christian engagement in the public square? Or will we allow America to become a nation with laws that no longer recognize God?

Smith did not become president, but his life poses an urgent question for Christians today: If those who fear the Lord do not shape the nation’s laws, then who will? The last century has seen the slow but deliberate retreat of Christian conviction from the public square, as secularists have successfully convinced many believers that faith belongs in private life alone. Smith would have rejected this as a dangerous illusion. A nation will either be governed by the righteous or by those who reject God’s law. The choice, as he saw it, was never between religious and secular government—it was between God’s justice and man’s rebellion. If America is to remain a land of true liberty, Christians must once again see their faith as a foundation for law and governance, not an obstacle to it.

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