His father, Colonel Richard Kidder Meade (1746–1805), one of George Washington's aides[1] during the American Revolutionary War, after the conflict ended sold his estate at Coggins Point on the James River near Henricus and bought 1000 acres and moved the family to the Shenandoah Valley.

[11] Young William Meade married Mary, daughter of his Frederick County neighbor and lay reader Philip Nelson, on January 31, 1810.

[12] Three years after her death, on December 16, 1820, William Meade remarried, to Thomasia, daughter of Thomas Nelson of Yorktown and Hanover, who zealously assisted him in his ministry for two decades before dying on May 20, 1836.

Meade afterward recalled that the congregation consisted of fifteen gentlemen and three ladies, almost all of them his relatives, and that on the way to Bruton Church many more gun-toting students and hunting dogs had passed them.

When Meade traveled back through Richmond, the newly ordained deacon noted that the city's only church St. John's was only open for communion occasions, and that the Episcopalian Dr. Buchanan and Presbyterian Dr. Blair alternated Sundays.

The following year Meade and several other prominent Virginians convinced William Holland Wilmer of Chestertown, Maryland, to move to Alexandria and the new national capital to serve as rector at St. Paul's Church after the newly ordained deacon Meade tried to serve those parishioners' needs as well as those of Alexandria's older parish for several months despite their significant distance down the Lord Fairfax Highway from his family's preferred home.

Later, Meade became known for his forays throughout Virginia, especially by horse even during severe weather, preaching among diverse parishes, until he ceded to old age and used a carriage (which some joked dated from his father's service with General Washington).

That organization opposed what it considered the heterodoxy of many of the books published by the Sunday School Union, and attempted to displace them by issuing works of a more evangelical type.

Three years earlier, he had refused suggestions that he apply to become the now-elderly Bishop William White's assistant in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.

Meade then began an extensive visitation of the diocese, which took him to Martinsburg, then through the Shenandoah valley (Woodstock, Harrisonburg, and Staunton) before conducting Christmas services in Halifax and returning north to Alexandria.

Unlike his neighboring bishops Whittingham of Maryland and Ravenscroft and Ives of North Carolina, Meade opposed the Oxford Movement as too "Romish" (particularly after Rt.Rev.

In 1851, some Virginians in counties north and west of Meade's familial home wanted to secede from Virginia, politically as well as by selecting their own bishop.

[24] His views were influenced by his sister Ann Randolph Meade Page (died 1838) as well as his clerical mentors (who both freed slaves).

Robert Finley (a Presbyterian), Francis Scott Key and U.S. Supreme Court clerk Elias B. Caldwell (son of the "fighting chaplain of the third New Jersey regiment") establish that organization.

Beginning in 1833, Bishop Meade, Judge William Leigh of Halifax and lawyer Francis Scott Key administered the will of their friend John Randolph of Roanoke, who died without children and who in his final testament directed his executors to free his more than four hundred slaves.

Meade repeated the educational theme through his addresses and parochial reports, and in 1856 was criticized by an anonymous correspondent for remarks concerning slavery "in the presence of ten or twelve Negroes, who were candidates for confirmation.

"[29] Meade convinced himself of the reciprocal nature of the master-slave relationship, and by 1857 published Christian proslavery tracts in his own name, declaring in his historical masterwork "If the evil passions are sometimes called into exercise, the milder virtues are much more frequently drawn forth.

[31] Johns later summarized Meade's position as disliking slavery and considering it politically disadvantageous to the country, but relying on his own experience concerning manumission's failures.

[32] As Meade grew older, perhaps influenced by slave rebellions in Virginia, or his family's business interests, his views concerning slavery became more conservative.

Biographer Johns stated that bishop Meade wrote to an American Tract Society meeting in New York opposing "an attempt ... made to introduce the leaven of New England fanaticism" and that Meade was unable to attend such meeting, but failed to mention the year the Tract Society's directors then defeated the abolitionist resolution.

Charles Wesley Andrews "to be expended in the manner directed in a paper or papers accompanying this will", as well as refers to two farms (Mountain View previously purchased by his son Philip Nelson Meade but who had not received a deed, and the adjacent Browers Farm and land in Missouri given to his three sons jointly with the expectation of sale and division between them).

In 1859, shortly after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (not very far down the historic Shenandoah Valley road from Meade's familial home and farm), the Episcopal Church held its General Convention in Richmond.

[37] According to tradition, the dying Virginia bishop gave his last blessing to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, whom he had long known from the days both had lived and worshiped in Alexandria, and who was married to the daughter of his sister Ann Page's best friend.

In 1868, Virginia's diocesan council authorized a church near the Meade family's estates in White Post, which was begun in 1872 under the direction of Rev.

John Ravenscroft Jones (rector of Meade's home Cunninham Chapel Parish as well as disciplined for his Confederate sympathies by occupying Union forces) and consecrated in 1875.