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chosen as clerical delegate to General Convention and as trustee of the General Theological Seminary. At the General Convention of that year he was appointed to the special committee charged with drafting a canon on missionary bishops. Clearly his worth was becoming known to the Church at large, for at the following General Convention in 1838 he was chosen to the missionary jurisdiction in the Southwest with "impressive unanimity". Despite his persistent ill health and his wish to stay quietly on his plantation with his wife and growing family, he accepted the charge and was consecrated bishop in Christ Church, Cincinnati, on December 9, 1838, one of his consecrators being the man who had baptized him, Charles Pettit McIlvaine, who had become Bishop of Ohio.

In their history of the Church in Louisiana (So Great a Good) Hodding and Betty Carter justly observe, "The arduousness of this charge the American Church had entrusted to a 32-year-old man of frail health is not fully comprehended even by the knowledge that it meant the supervision of