CHAPTER VIII
THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT WORK.
The beginning of a work among these images of God cut in ebony is found in the following resolutions looking to the protection of the interests of the colored man by the civil government. It is nothing against a system that it was badly managed or fell into bad hands, or else our venerated Constitution is involved. That General Conference (1864) in its report on freedmen, said:
“(1) Resolved, That in the events which have thrown the thousands of freed people upon the benevolence of the humane and loyal people of the North, we recognize a providential call to the Christian public for contributions for their physical relief and mental and moral elevation and especially to the Church of Christ for the means of their evangelization.
“(2) Resolved, That the best interests of the freedmen of the country demand legislation that shall foster and protect this people, and we do hereby respectfully but earnestly urge upon Congress the importance of establishing, as soon as practicable, a Bureau of Freedmen’s Affairs, as contemplated in the bills now pending.”
What did this mean? If it meant anything, the Church meant to practice, at its earliest convenience, the doctrine it had been preaching for the last eighty years and more,—that the poor enslaved colored man should be properly trained to enjoy this life and that which is to come. It meant that just as soon as the alarms of war had sufficiently subsided and God opened the way, or signified that an entrance could be gained, to go at once up and down through the Southland carrying the gospel of free salvation to the downtrodden, poverty-stricken, and demoralized colored man. While but few, if any, believe the only mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the South was to the poor colored man, but few will doubt that, had it no other call to go into the South, that were enough. But few rational Christians believe the Church had no call into the South.
That the Church was needed there, no one will question when the condition of the colored man at that time is considered, as well as the relation the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, sustained to the colored man before and during the war, and that other significant fact that the colored man, as such, was, and for that matter is, peculiarly either a Baptist or a Methodist. From the beginning Methodism took hold of him, and he learned that, wherever found, a true Methodist was his friend. This in itself is sufficient explanation of the peculiarity referred to above. What was the condition of the colored man at the close of the war? When the black smoke of battle arose from a hundred battlefields the entire colored population—four and a half millions—came forth ignorant, superstitious, degraded, and poverty-stricken. The only beam of hope rested entirely on the education of the race. The emancipation was followed by the enfranchisement of these ignorant and superstitious people. The cry of opposition was heard vociferously in the South, while in some places in the North leading newspapers and men expressed doubts as to the wisdom of the thing. Who, under the then existing circumstances, doubted the earnestness of those who cried out as they saw the colored men clothed with freedom and franchise, yet slaves to superstition and ignorance:
“A poor, blind Samson is in our land,
Bound hand and foot, and prone upon his back;
But who knows that, in some drunken revel,