Been in the Storm So Long (99 page)

During the past six years in the North, he went on to explain, he had been engaged largely in “theoretical pursuits”; although this had made him confident of his intellectual abilities, he thought the transition to “practical life” had simply been too abrupt. But he remained determined to succeed, if only because he recognized the unique opportunity he had been afforded. “Here I am at last in a Slave State. How strange are the workings of Providence! Who would have thought three years ago that such mighty and important changes would so soon take place?”
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No matter how they defined success, and this tended to vary, the missionaries and teachers who descended upon the post-emancipation South would express considerable gratification over the progress of their efforts, even as the records they left behind also revealed moments of frustration, doubt, and discouragement. For the freedmen, of course, the opportunity to worship in their own churches and to be taught in their own schoolhouses had to be one of the supreme manifestations of their new status. Not surprisingly, though, any attempt to impose “civilizing” influences on a “backward” people is bound to produce its share of misunderstandings and tensions between the evangels and their wards, in part because that was invariably how the evangels viewed the relationship. Whether to appease the hostility of native whites or to placate the cultural biases and psychic needs of their northern friends, the freedmen would be forced to pay some price in violated sensitivities and prolonged dependencies. Regardless of whether they were treated with disdain, a benign tolerance, or exaggerated praise and condescension, there would be the many occasions on which a freedman or freedwoman might have easily identified with the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
, who observed, “When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
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S
INCE EARLY IN THE WAR
, the black South had loomed as a fertile field for missionary labor. None recognized this potential more readily than did the black churchmen of the North.
“The Rubicon is passable,”
exulted the Reverend James Lynch in September 1861, after noting how his African Methodist Episcopal Church had been compelled for years to operate on the northern side of the Potomac River. “With God for our guide, and his promises for our specie currency,
we will cross
, and carry there the legacy of the sainted Allen, our church government, and the word of God.” Although the black church acted initially with caution, pending a clarification of the war’s objectives, the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of blacks in the Union Army removed any lingering doubts. Within several months of these developments, James Lynch was on his way to South Carolina. “My own heart has been fired by our brethren here,” he soon reported. “Ignorant though they be, on account of long years of oppression, they exhibit a desire to hear and to learn, that I never imagined. Every word you say while preaching, they drink down and respond to, with an earnestness that sets your heart all on fire, and you feel that it is indeed God’s work to minister to them.”
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Although other denominations were no less zealous in bringing the freed slaves into their respective folds, the Methodists and the Baptists
enjoyed a clear advantage from the outset. If the Baptists offered greater organizational flexibility and more easily accommodated native black preachers, the Methodists provided, as the founder of the AME Church once explained, “the plain simple gospel” which “the unlearned can understand, and the learned are sure to understand.” Both of these pietistic sects also found it necessary to spend less time in conversion than in simply providing the organizational structure that would accommodate the tens of thousands of slaves already committed to their faiths. When the Reverend Lynch, for example, sought to organize the 800 black residents of Helenaville, into the AME Church, he would report that “they all readily assented, with the exception of a few Baptists.” At the same time, he continued, “I licensed two local preachers, and two exhorters who had been previously verbally licensed; I never saw men appreciate anything so much in my life.”
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No matter what denominations they represented, the black missionaries found upon entering the South a ready confirmation of the marvelous workings of the Divine Spirit. To look around them, to witness at first hand this “most terrible retribution” which God had inflicted on the white South for the “cruel barbarities” of slavery, more than fulfilled the warnings they had hurled against Babylon from their pulpits in the North. What more dramatic proof of His presence and the triumph of His justice than to see for themselves Pharaoh’s hosts engulfed and vanquished. After the Reverend Richard H. Cain walked through the streets of Charleston and gazed at the ruins that were once “the dwellings of the proud and defiant manstealers,” he could only conclude that this city had become “a monument of God’s indignation and an evidence of His righteous judgments.” For the slave, he added, a new era had dawned, the day of redemption was at hand, and the prophet’s proclamation had come to be realized: “Arise, shine: for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon thee.” And those who wished to oversee the fulfillment of this prophecy had only to “go among this redeemed people; enter their humble homesteads; sit down with them and listen to their stories of wrong and their songs of rejoicing; [and] gain their confidence.” For the Reverend Cain, Charleston was the place to establish his church for the freedmen.
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Although some of the black missionaries had once resided in the South as slaves or free Negroes, many of them were native Northerners who had formed their impressions of slavery in the abolitionist movement. Upon entering the South, then, they expected to find a people degraded and scarred—physically and psychically—by a lifetime of bondage and in desperate need of “regeneration and civilization.” No proclamation or legislative act, they assumed, could get at the evils that had accumulated and festered over many decades. “As a malignant cancer leaves its roots after being apparently cured,” the Reverend James W. C. Pennington observed from Jacksonville, Florida, “so Slavery has left its barbarisms which are in danger of being mixt up with all that is now being done for the advancement of christian civilization among the people.” The breakup of slavery,
he believed, had uncovered “a fearful moral chaos” in the South, and only education and “the
Remedial power of the Gospel”
could accomplish for the African race in the United States what they had already achieved for the Anglo-Saxon race. Repeatedly, clerics and teachers alike would define the task before them as undoing the moral depravity, self-debasement, and dependency which slavery had fostered in its victims, and the Reverend Cain, for one, thought no vestiges of bondage more resistant to reform than these.
“The people are emancipated but not free!”
he wrote from Charleston.
“They are still slaves to their old ideas
, as well as to their masters. The great masses have, by the old systems, been taught that they were inferior to the whites in everything, and they believe it still.”
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If instruction in the spelling book could be left to the teacher, the work of moral reformation belonged properly to the clergyman, but in the postemancipation South such distinctions in roles were seldom deemed necessary or even desirable and the teacher and the minister in some instances were the same person. In any event, both the school and the church declared open war on the “rum-suckers, bar-room loafers, whiskey-dealers, and card players among the men, and those women who dressed finely on
ill-gotten
gain.” The best weapon by which to combat these evils was instruction at every level in the virtues of temperance, marital fidelity, chastity, and domestic economy. The larger and the more urgently this task loomed, the more frequently went out the appeals for assistance—for more individuals like themselves who would dedicate their lives to the work of redemption. “The only thing I regret is, that there are not more Baptist and Methodist ministers down here,” the Reverend Arthur Waddell wrote from Beaufort, South Carolina. “When I say this, I mean
colored ministers
, and I do not mean the
silk-gloved
kind, and those who come down here to buy farms, and to cheat these poor people out of their rights. But I mean those who come down here to preach Christ in the way that St. Paul commanded Timothy.”
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But the work of moral reformation was considered too vast and too critical to leave to “colored ministers” alone. The white benevolent societies placed the highest priority on this kind of missionary labor. That was why Marcia Colton, upon arriving in Virginia, found herself assigned not to a classroom or to a church but to Craney Island, in Norfolk harbor, where she assumed responsibility for reforming a group of black prostitutes. In a prison-like encampment, she would attempt to direct these fallen women into “the paths of virtue” and toward “Christ the Fountain that cleaneth from all Sin.”

Although not relishing the assignment, Miss Colton accepted it “in the name and for the sake of Christ.” Her task was made no easier by the conduct of the soldiers guarding the encampment, some of whom effected sexual liaisons with the black women. “Alas—alas!” reported Miss Colton, “that Sin,—the Sin of Sodom is so common in our Army. It’s a Sore trial to Me that I do not have any Christian on the Island amongst the Guard and no one even comes near Me to offer Me any support.” Moreover, she complained, the officers in charge of the camp viewed the problem “with Man’s judgment,” while “I from a Christian & moral standpoint, with Woman’s Pity for the degraded and fallen of our own sex.” Whatever methods she adopted to enlighten the women in the ways of virtuous living, the results were less than gratifying. Upon serving out their “sentences,” the women often returned to their “old haunts” in Norfolk, where they would soon be arrested again and returned to the island. “There are so many temptations in Norfolk, and they have so little moral power that it’s hardly possible for them to resist.… I am not able to spend much time in instructing them. They are not disposed to listen much to instruction.” Despairing over her ineffectuality, Miss Colton suggested that the source of the problem might lie in the African heathenism to which these “poor degraded freedwomen” clung. “I am aware when I say this that you will repel the Idea from your Mind as quickly as possible,” she wrote to her supervisor. “Yet nevertheless I think it
True
. How else can I get any excuse for this predominance of Animal habits which show themselves all the while with most of them?”
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Not the least of the “barbarisms” associated with slavery that dismayed both white and black missionaries was, in fact, the excessive emotionalism, frenzy, and “heathenism” they claimed to find in the religious practices of the freedmen. Upon visiting a service on Roanoke Island, Henry M. Turner thought the black parishioners worshipped “under a lower class of ideas” and entertained crude conceptions of God. “Hell fire, brimstone, damnation, black smoke, hot lead, &c, appeared to be presented by the speaker as man’s highest incentive to serve God, while the milder and yet more powerful message of Jesus was thoughtlessly passed by.” No revival was considered complete, Turner observed on another occasion, without some blacks indulging in the most ludicrous capers. “Let a person get a little animated, fall down and roll over awhile, kick a few shins, crawl under a dozen benches, spring upon his feet, … then squeal and kiss (or buss) around for awhile, and the work is all done.” If they had acted with less zeal, Turner surmised, the legitimacy of their conversion might have been questioned. It was this kind of “ignorant” and frenzied worship that led Thomas W. Cardozo to avoid the freedmen’s church in Charleston and that prompted an educated black woman to remark, “I won’t go to the colored churches, for I’m only disgusted with bad grammar and worse pronunciation, and their horrible absurdities.”
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