Been in the Storm So Long (101 page)

Equally concerned with “pretended benefactors of the colored race” who “make lucre the chief idol of their devoted shrine,” Henry M. Turner voiced the not uncommon fear that white missionaries and teachers, by virtue of their color and eagerness to be accepted in the communities in which they worked, might naturally gravitate toward the native whites and be the more easily beguiled by them. For the black missionary, however, as Turner quickly noted, “no sumptuous tables, fine chambers, attractive misses, springy buggies, or swinging carriages” would distract him from his labors, since “he would find his level only among the colored race.” Not only would he gain easier access to the homes and social gatherings of the
freedmen but “his influence and personal identification with them would go farther than the white man’s” and he would be more apt to expose and resist schemes which exploited the labor of the freed slaves in the guise of philanthropic enterprise.
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The black missionary moved quickly to exploit a critical advantage he had over his white denominational rivals. He could offer the freedmen an immediate alternative to the white man’s church and to the white minister. “The Ebony preacher who promises perfect independence from White control and direction carries the col[ore]d heart at once,” an officer in the American Missionary Association observed. Near Columbia, Kentucky, a newly freed slave who had some years before been ordained as a deacon and elder in the white Methodist Episcopal Church needed little persuasion to transfer his loyalties to the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “I was offered liberal inducements to continue in the M.E. Church and preach to my people,” he explained, “but I preferred to come out from under the yoke. I had been there long enough.” That was reason enough for tens of thousands of freedmen and freedwomen to abandon the white-dominated churches for their own facilities, organizations, and preachers; indeed, such a move became for some as important and symbolic an assertion of freedom as the decision to separate from the scene of their bondage. For years they had listened to the white preachers admonish them to embrace their situation and obey their worldly masters in order to gain admission to “the kitchen of heaven.”

For years, too, they had put up with the deception and hypocrisy of these professed men of God, some of whom were themselves slaveholders. “The man that baptized me,” Susan Boggs observed, “had a colored woman tied up in his yard to whip when he got home, that very Sunday and her mother belonged to that same church.… That was our preacher!” Nor did the stale and empty sermons of the white minister and his manner of worship succeed in moving them spiritually or emotionally. “Dat ole white preachin’ wasn’t nothin’,” Nancy Williams recalled. “Ole white preachers used to talk wid dey tongues widdout sayin’ nothin’, but Jesus told us slaves to talk wid our hearts.” Inevitably, then, as a former Texas slave suggested, “the whites preached to the niggers and the niggers preached to themselves.”
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With many slaves preferring one of their own to preach God’s word, the arrangement worked out in some churches before the Civil War permitted the black worshippers to convene separately with their own preacher or exhorter, though a white man would presumably be present to oversee the proceedings. Typically, a former Alabama slave recalled, “white fo’ks have deir service in de mornin’ an’ ‘Niggers’ have deirs in de evenin’, a’ter
dey clean up, wash de dishes, an’ look a’ter everything.… Ya’see ‘Niggers’ lack’ta shout a whole lot an’ wid de white fo’ks al’round’em, dey couldn’t shout jes’ lack dey want to.” Where such liberties were not permitted the slaves, the master might hire a white preacher to visit the plantation, or the slaves would simply accompany the master’s family to the white church and sit in the gallery overlooking the white worshippers. Later in the day or that night, without the master’s knowledge, the slaves would gather in their quarters or in the nearby woods to hold the “real meetin’.” Emancipation, however, enabled blacks to dispense with the secrecy and the pretense. The black preacher and exhorter no longer needed to accommodate sermons to the needs and presence of the master, nor did black worshippers need to fear an imminent intrusion by white men into their services. “Praise God for this day of liberty to worship God!” was how one freedman described his new status, while another placed his hand on the shoulder of the black preacher and remarked, “Bless God, my son, we don’t have to keep watch at that door to tell us the patrollers are coming to take us to jail and fine us twenty-five dollars for prayin’ and talkin’ of the love of Jesus. O no, we’s FREE!”
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Where blacks had once been obliged to worship under a white preacher, they were now in a position to depose him, hire their own preacher, and choose their own organizational affiliation. For both the white minister and the black congregation, the transition of a church from slavery to freedom could be as traumatic as the simultaneous upheavals affecting the masters of the plantations and their field hands and servants. Several days after the fall of Wilmington, North Carolina, nearly 1,600 blacks filled the Front Street Methodist Church, where the Reverend L. S. Burkhead, a white minister, regularly presided over the predominantly black congregation. Traditionally, every Sunday morning the class leaders, all of whom were black, would conduct the sunrise prayer meeting. But the mood of the assemblage on this first Sunday after Union occupation suggested at once to the Reverend Burkhead, as he took his seat near the altar, that this would be a unique service. “The whole congregation was wild with excitement,” he recalled, “and extravagant beyond all precedent with shouts, groans, amens, and unseemingly demonstrations.” After the already excited throng joined in the singing of a hymn appropriate for the occasion, “Sing unto the Lord a New Song,” the Reverend William H. Hunter, a chaplain in one of the black regiments which had helped to liberate the city, strode to the pulpit upon the invitation of the class leaders. No military triumph could have afforded him any greater personal satisfaction than the return to a region in which he had once been a slave, and he made this immediately clear in his address, with the crowd enthusiastically chanting their responses.

After “the tumultuous uproar” subsided, the Reverend Burkhead, visibly shaken by the proceedings, retired to his parsonage to consider the implications. He thought he had known his parishioners, and he had accepted in good faith their pledge a few weeks earlier to stand behind him. But that was before the Union Army appeared and before the black chaplain had been permitted “to unsettle all their former principles and ideas of subordination.” Now, he surmised from what he had heard, the newly freed slaves seemed to anticipate a new era in which the whites who had owned them surrendered their churches, dwellings, and lands and bowed down to them “to receive the manacles of slavery.” Had the Reverend Burkhead known the outcome of his speculations and fears, he might have praised God and rested comfortably. But for the moment, at least, like so many of the white clergymen who had presided over black congregations, he would have more urgent matters to consider, such as a formal demand by his congregation that he be deposed and that the church be permitted to affiliate with the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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W
ITH SOME FOUR MILLION
souls at stake, the struggle for supremacy among the several Protestant denominations often took on the spirit and the language associated with the prosecution of a war. Into the breach left by departing and deposed “rebel” ministers poured native black preachers and both white and black northern missionaries, and each congregation captured would be hailed as though an enemy had been routed. “Our cause has been gaining daily,” the Reverend Cain reported from South Carolina.
“In Columbia, the capital of the State, we have captured all the Methodists, and are laying the foundation for an immense congregation.” Less than forty-eight hours after General Sherman entered Savannah, the Reverend James Lynch was in the city to claim Andrew’s Chapel, previously affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church; the white minister had fled, and under the Reverend Lynch’s exhortations the black congregation voted overwhelmingly to align itself with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Consolidating the gains made by previous missionaries, the Reverend Henry M. Turner reported in early 1866 that Georgia had been secured for the AME Church. “I have visited every place it was safe to go, and sent preachers where it was thought I had better not venture. Last night was the first quiet night I have had for five weeks in succession.”
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Few triumphs, however, were more gratifying to the African Methodist Episcopal Church than the day in September 1865 when the cornerstone was laid for a new church building in Charleston. Not only did this mark the return of the AME Church to a city from which it had been banished some forty years earlier for complicity in the Denmark Vesey insurrection plot but the new building would be erected exclusively by black labor and the architect was none other than Robert Vesey, the son of the executed insurrectionist. Some three thousand black Charlestonians listened that day to speeches from a group of black clergymen who would for the next decade play a dominant role in both the religious and the political history of the state. By September 1866, a black Charlestonian could proudly describe eleven colored churches in his city—five Methodist (two of them affiliated with the AME Church), two Presbyterian, two Episcopalian, one Congregational, and one Baptist. “The flower of the city,” he also noted, worshipped at the Episcopalian Church (St. Mark’s), some of “the wealthiest colored families” attended the Methodist Episcopal Church (which had been reorganized by northern white missionaries), and the Reverend Cain’s AME Church was made up largely of newly freed slaves. In Charleston, as in other urban centers where a free Negro community had thrived before the war, church affiliation often reflected divisions of class, status, and color within the black community. And if the experience of Ed Barber some years after the war was in any way typical, those who crossed those lines in choosing a church might come away disappointed.

Almost conceding defeat at the outset, the Methodist Episcopal Church (South) did little to check the mass withdrawal of blacks from its ranks.
Within a year after the end of the war, in fact, it had already lost more than half of its black membership; those who remained would soon be reorganized into a separate Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.
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To win over the departing black Methodists, an often furious battle ensued between the Methodist Episcopal Church (North) and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Despite the impressive number and quality of the missionaries dispatched South by the northern Methodists and their clear superiority in financial resources, the black Methodist organizations also did quite well, demonstrating to their satisfaction that “blood is always more potent than money.” In some communities, the rivals worked out a “compromise” by which preachers of both denominations used the same building and took turns at the pulpit. But at least one black minister who experimented with that arrangement found it unworkable. “The Apostle said, ‘Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.’ But in an accommodating sense, I say be not unequally yoked together with a white man.” Even less charitable, the Reverend Richard H. Cain viewed his Methodist rival in Charleston as “this Judas, who comes here to rule over our people with his Yankee rod of iron,” acting “more like Barnwell Rhett with his slaves, than a minister of Christ.”
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