“So speak ye, and so do, as they shall be judged by the law of liberty.”  

—James 2:12 

The Independent Presbyterian Church on Chippewa Square 

To adequately explore the history of this beautiful and enduring church, we return to 1758. Savannah Independent Presbyterian Church and its tiny congregation persuaded a thirty-four-year-old minister named John J. Zubly to leave nearby Charles Town, South Carolina, to take up its small pulpit. 

Under Zubly’s direction, the Savannah congregation would quickly become the largest and most popular in Georgia, and he would become both a celebrated and divisive revolutionary pamphleteer.  

While in Savannah, Zubly acquired considerable land and slaves to work it. His Calvinist theology led him directly into addressing the conflicting political debates of his time. He became a leading spokesman for Georgia in its many political disputes with Great Britain. For example, he became a powerful patriotic voice speaking against the Stamp Act; he also opposed the official Anglican Church of England in its attempts to tyrannize colonists away from expressing differing religious views. 

In 1770, the leading Presbyterian institution in the colonies, the College of New Jersey — now known as Princeton — awarded Zubly with an honorary Master of Arts degree. Four years later, college President and future Revolutionary leader John Witherspoon handed him a Doctor of Divinity degree, as well.  

By July 1775, the citizens of Georgia elected John Zubly to be one of five representatives to the Second Continental Congress held in Philadelphia. His intense and passionate debate with Samuel Chase of Maryland reached a fevered pitch. John Adams later lamented in a letter to his wife, Abigail, that Zubly was ‘too little acquainted with the world’ and too ‘conversed with Books so much more than Men.’  

Only four months later, Zubly would return to Savannah branded a traitor because of his opposition to American independence from Britain. His stand against the revolution, detailed in his The Law of Liberty sermon, was given in 1775. In that sermon, Zubly frankly expressed his view that favoring American independence over the British monarchy was principally the same as ‘the turning away from God.’ 

Zubly noted that one could be against any oppressions imposed upon the Georgia colonialists by the Monarchy yet view Republican self-government as ‘little different from a government of devils.’ His call for reconciliation with the British Crown cost him his land, his liberty, and his reputation.  

For his views, Zubly was banished from Georgia by the Georgia Committee of Public Safety, a shadow government of American Revolutionary Patriots trying to wrestle power away from Royal Colonial Officials. He returned to Savannah throughout the American Revolutionary War while the British controlled the city. Interestingly, the moral arguments that led Zubly to oppose Independence found a contrast in Presbyterian theologian John Witherspoon, who passionately supported the Revolution. 

The initial building housing the Independent Presbyterian Church in Savannah was a small structure nicknamed the Meeting House located in Decker Ward. President James Monroe was in attendance for the dedication of the modern structure, completed in 1819, built here off Chippewa Square. Destroyed by fire in 1889, that building was rebuilt to its original form and painted en Plein air here. 

Woodrow Wilson, later the twenty-eighth U.S. President, was married in the church’s parsonage in 1885. He married Savannahian-born Ellen Louise Axson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister.