Broadus was ordained in 1850 and became pastor of the Baptist church in Charlottesville. In 1859, Broadus along with James P. Boyce, Basil Manly Jr., and William Williams, founded the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Greenville, South Carolina. Broadus became professor of New Testament interpretation and homiletics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. During the American Civil War, he served as a Confederate chaplain to Robert E. Lee's army in Northern Virginia. He delivered at the University of Virginia in memorial to Professor Gessner Harrison in 1873. In 2018 the President of the Seminary commissioned a of the organization's four founders, which found that Broadus and the others owned 50 slaves, Broadus owning at least two slaves, and the faculty and trustees at the seminary defended the “righteousness of slavery” and supported the Confederacy’s efforts to preserve slavery. Broadus repudiated American slavery in 1882. In 1883, he delivered on the Confederate cause at Louisville's Cave Hill Cemetery. That was an important part of reunion, as he argued that both sides were partly correct in their positions that led to war. In 1888, he became Southern Seminary's second president. In 1889, Broadus delivered the Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School. Broadus died in 1895.
Personal life
Broadus married Maria Carter Harrison on Nov. 14, 1849. She died Oct. 21, 1857. He remarried, to Charlotte Eleanor Sinclair on January 4, 1859.
Legacy
called Broadus the "greatest of living preachers." Church historian Albert Henry Newman called Broadus "perhaps the greatest preacher the Baptists have produced." The official gavel of the Southern Baptist Convention controversially bears the name of Broadus and, in June, 2020, President J.D. Greear proposed the organization "retire the Broadus gavel" "amid nationwide protests around racial injustice that has led to the removal of Confederate statues and symbols." Broadus Chapel at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a near-replica of the First Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island, is named for John Broadus.
