The social side of the relations of the two races in their religious life is very interesting. The two races came very close together. The negroes were called together by a horn or a bell once a day for family prayer in which the master, mistress, and the children participated. Sometimes the master conducted the services, and sometimes a slave would do it. Slaves sang at these services, and frequently became so religious as to embrace their master and mistress before the close of service. In their religious life, slaves became little children indeed.
On Sunday as a rule, the slaves attended church with the white folks. They either sat in the galleries or had a special portion of the church set apart for them. They were given the communion after the white people had been served. There was usually in the afternoon on Sunday a special service for the slaves, conducted by the pastor of the church, and there was generally a separate business meeting for the slaves. At these separate services, the slaves practically had charge. Their own leaders, exhorters, and preachers were merely directed by the white pastor. It was in these meetings that they received their greatest training and had their truest religious experience.[86]
Few men knew the negro so well as the Methodist preacher, or did so much to elevate his character. He presided at their church trials, of which one of their number was secretary. He was the general umpire to whom all their church difficulties were referred. He baptized them, married them, visited them in their cabins, comforted them in their distress, prayed with them when on beds of sickness, was their counsellor, friend, and spiritual guide, and he preached their funerals when they died.[87]
The Methodist people did more for the negro than any other denomination, whether for abolition or for their general improvement. Peter Cartwright once said that the Methodist Episcopal Church had “been the cause of the emancipation of more slaves in these United States than all other religious denominations put together.”[88] “It is a notorious fact,” said Cartwright, “that all the preachers from the slaveholding states denounced slavery as a moral evil; but asked of the General Conference mercy and forbearance on account of the civil disabilities they labored under so that we got along tolerably smooth. I do not recollect a single Methodist preacher at that day that justified slavery.... Methodist preachers in those days made it a matter of conscience not to hold their fellow creatures in bondage, if it was practicable to emancipate them, conformably to the laws of the state in which they lived. Methodism increased and spread, and many Methodist preachers, taken from comparative poverty, not able to own a negro, and who preached loudly against it, improved and became popular among slaveholding families, and became personally interested in slave property. They then began to apologize for the evil; then to justify it, on legal principles; then on Bible principles.”[89]
II. The Baptists.
The Baptists were among the original settlers in Tennessee. They were strong in North Carolina by 1750,[90] and by 1780 were coming into Tennessee from both Virginia and North Carolina in great numbers.[91] They settled in the Holston country and on Boone’s Creek, but they were not so numerous in these early days as the Presbyterians and Methodists.[92] In 1784 there were 400 Baptists in Tennessee; 900 in 1792, and 11,325 in 1812.
The Baptists were anti-slavery in the early period of American history, just as were the Methodists. 1783 the Baptists said:
It is the duty of every master of a family to give his slaves liberty to attend the worship of God in his family, and likewise it is his duty to convince them of their duty; and then to leave them to their own choice.[93]
In 1789 John Leland proposed the following resolution in the Triennial Convention, which was adopted: