The History of the Negro Church

by Carter Godwin Woodson

REV. PETER WILLIAMS
First colored Protestant Episcopal priest in the United States.

In this position of subjection to a church control in which he himself as a man of color did not largely figure, Peter Williams was handicapped and could not serve his race as he desired. At the time of the intense agitation during the great crisis when the Negroes were called upon to decide where they would stand on the questions of colonization and abolition, Peter Williams at first took an active part in pleading the cause of his people. Seeing, however, that this might bring the church to the position of having to declare itself on this important question, the bishops of the Episcopal Church, in keeping with the custom of that denomination, silenced Peter Williams with a decree that he should preach merely the gospel without interfering with the political affairs of the times. It does not appear that he had that moral stamina to impel him to renounce his connection with a church seeking to muzzle a man praying for the deliverance of his people. It may be, however, that, as he was too far advanced in years to make any radical change in his course, he followed the orders of his superiors.

In Baltimore the Episcopalians practically provided a separate church for Negroes known as the St. James. This was the first Negro church of this denomination established in slave territory. The Negroes were given a building of their own and one Levington was from time to time designated as rector for this special service. Although it appears, however, that for a time a Negro served in this capacity, this task was generally assigned to a rector of Caucasion blood, who fed the people from afar with a long-handled spoon, believing that haply they might be thereby fed. This church in Baltimore, therefore, did not figure so largely in the life of the Negroes as did the Negro Episcopal churches of Philadelphia and New York. In other places where Negroes of this faith were found they were dependent altogether on the ministers of whites. The records of the Protestant Church show here and there Negro rectors in remote parts as in the case of one in a small town in New York and another in Connecticut; but it is evident that they had no employment.

The Presbyterians, who welcomed the Negroes, moreover, were not much more successful in proselyting them. When one considers the liberality of this sect in that its theological seminaries, including even Princeton, opened its doors to Negroes and that the denomination too permitted persons of color to participate in the government of the church to the extent that they not only spoke and exercised the right to vote in their meetings but also served as moderators, this disinclination on the part of Negroes to attach themselves to the Presbyterian Church may require much explanation. Wherever the Presbyterians had the opportunity for proselyting the Negroes they usually embraced it. Yet there were hardly 20,000 Negroes in the Presbyterian church prior to the Civil War. One of the important reasons is that the Methodists and Baptists were the first to reach the Negro. The Methodists, moreover, had an itinerant system serving like scouts to go out into the wilderness to find the people and bring them in. Then this disinclination was due also to the fact that the Presbyterian church, somewhat like the more aristocratic churches, disregarded the "emotional character of experimental religion." Its appeal was too intellectual. As Bishop Tanner said: "It strove to lift up without coming down and while the good Presbyterian parson was writing his discourses, rounding off the sentences, the Methodist itinerant had traveled forty miles with his horse and saddle bags; while the parson was adjusting his spectacles to read his manuscript, the itinerant had given hell and damnation to his unrepentant hearers; while the disciple of Calvin was waiting to have his church completed, the disciple of Wesley took to the woods and made them reëcho with the voice of free grace, believing with Bryant, 'The groves were God's first temples.'"

This same appeal of the evangelical rather than the ritualistic explains also the slow progress of the Catholic work among Negroes. The Catholics were early concerned with the amelioration of the condition of the Negroes and were found among the first to bear testimony against slavery. This denomination opened schools to enlighten the children of the slaves, established missions to reclaim the wayward, and all but granted the despised bondmen in their circles the privileges of liberty and equality. The success of their workers among Negroes, however, was not phenomenal. The Catholics did not make much impression on the Negroes in the large cities of the North, where they were more accessible than in the South; but considerable good was accomplished by the promising beginnings in and around Baltimore, Washington, Mobile, and New Orleans. So well was the foundation laid that the reaction in favor of slavery did not altogether counteract this healthy influence in behalf of the enlightenment of the Negroes. Only a small percentage of the race thereby profited, however. The proportionately small number of Negroes now belonging to the Catholic Church have been proselyted largely since the Civil War.

The Congregationalists became interested in the uplift of the Negroes with whom they came into contact, although the number reached did not multiply. The leaders of this denomination sympathized with the slave, aided the fugitive, and preached to the unfortunate the principles of religion so dear to the hearts of their communicants. But so great was the hold of the more evangelical sects on the Negroes that the earliest successful effort to constitute a group of them as a working body in the Congregational Church was the establishment of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1829. The records do not show any considerable accession of Negroes to these ranks until after the Civil War when the work of this denomination was popularized in various parts by that efficient worker and organizer, the late G. W. Moore.