RICHMOND, June 26 - The last General Assembly in this historic city adjourned 157 years ago.

When commissioners gathered here in 1847, the issue that dominated the agenda was slavery.

Officials of the Presbyterian church in Great Britain had sent letters to the American church deploring the institution of slavery and calling on U.S. Presbyterians to call for its abolition.

According to James Smylie, professor emeritus of church history at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education (Union-PSCE) in Richmond, the commissioners responded to their Scottish and Irish counterparts by "underscoring the difficulty of doing what their colleagues across the water advocated."

Smylie, who served for 27 years as the editor of the Journal of Presbyterian History, said the church of 1847 was unwilling or unable to deal with the issue of slavery, despite a long Presbyterian tradition of engagement with social and political issues.

The two leading Presbyterian figures of the day - one from the North, the other from the South - agreed during the Assembly that slavery was a matter for the state, not the church, to deal with. They seemingly were stumped by the moral, economic and political complexities that would plunge the nation into civil war just 14 years later.

The presiding and outgoing moderators of the General Assembly criticized slavery only tepidly, if at all. Charles Hodge, the Northerner who had moderated the 1846 Assembly in Philadelphia, and James Henly Thornwell, the South Carolinian chosen to moderate the Richmond meeting, agreed that religious instruction and mission work should go on in slave communities, but neither called for immediate abolition, Smylie said.

Smylie wrote two articles about the 1847 Assembly for The Presbyterian Outlook, an independent news magazine for Presbyterians that has been published under a variety of names since 1856.

The Civil War, which broke out in 1861, brought a schism in the Presbyterian denomination that lasted more than 100 years. National union wasn't achieved until 1983, when the northern and southern "streams" united to form the Presbyterian Church (USA).

"When commissioners were unable to agree over the issue of slavery, the General Assembly of 1847 did stand in favor of greater ecumenical partnership with like-minded Christian bodies," Smylie said. Their deliberations in 1847 led to the formation of an Evangelical Alliance that evolved into the Federal Council of Churches (1908), the World Council of Churches (1948) and the National Council of Churches (1950).

There were 182 commissioners to the 1847 Assembly. They met at the original site of First Presbyterian Church, near the current Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center. As many as 10,000 commissioners, delegates and volunteers are expected for the 2004 Assembly.

In 1847, the membership of the Presbyterian Church was about 180,000. Today it is 2.5 million.